PC Makers Hopeful That Chromebook Refresh Cycles About To Kick In (theregister.com) 21
A Chromebook refresh looms despite Google trying to extend the life of laptops by offering a decade of service updates for models sold since 2021. From a report: Sales of the hardware, which flew off the shelves during the pandemic, ran out of steam in 2022 after buyers had their fill. The US education market generally accounts for 70 to 80 percent of annual orders. The sharp downturn left some vendors holding excess inventory. Yet the refresh cycle may be starting again, according to HP boss Enrique Lores.
"So we have started to see a pickup of demand in education, and this, especially in the US, is a Chromebook opportunity," he told an audience of investors at Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decision Conference. He forecast a flurry of activity in 2025 for "many million of units" from education but downplayed the impact on HP's balance sheet because the company pulled back from the product line after the pandemic. Lores said: "We are going after these deals because we think it's good, but it's not like ... a huge impact on the company."
"So we have started to see a pickup of demand in education, and this, especially in the US, is a Chromebook opportunity," he told an audience of investors at Bernstein's 40th Annual Strategic Decision Conference. He forecast a flurry of activity in 2025 for "many million of units" from education but downplayed the impact on HP's balance sheet because the company pulled back from the product line after the pandemic. Lores said: "We are going after these deals because we think it's good, but it's not like ... a huge impact on the company."
Don't count on it... (Score:5, Insightful)
In education, there are always new students and there are always damaged units that need to be replaced. But there is not much need to upgrade.
Older systems are "good enough" for most use these days. We don't need to get a new phone or tablet or laptop or desktop every few years.
In the modern age, these are just tools.
Re:Don't count on it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Particularly with Chromebooks, where the devices are essentially the modern version of a dumb terminal.
However, you mention damaged units. So a potential driver of a major refresh cycle would be repair contracts expiring. In a more efficient system, you'd switch to buy on individual replacement, but everyone involved finds it easier to just purchase a bunch in bulk.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
It can... sort of kind of, but it doesn't really feel like it "wants" to. Like WSL feels more integrated than running Linux on a Chromebook, and that's not the best place either. Chromebooks target market remains "user should be doing everything from the browser", the Android runtime is a nice to have, but if you really want that, then an Android device will fare better. The ability to run more open ended Linux is better on a traditional Linux desktop. ChromeOS as a concept is just inherently limited and
Re: (Score:2)
The modern version of a dumb terminal needs a hell of a lot of horsepower to run modern web sites and all the ads on them... my initial Chromebooks would likely be near unusable these days if I still had them. Running Chrome alone requires a modern-ish quad core CPU and 16 GB of RAM to run comfortably these days if you're using productivity focused web applications (office suites, Confluence etc.). IIRC the last Chromebook I had came with 4 gigs on non-upgradeable RAM.
Summary of my Chromebook experience (Score:3)
Were you going for Funny with the vacuous Subject? The punchline of the joke was supposed to be something about human students as units to be replaced when damaged?
I did buy a Lenovo Chromebook after 2021. Probably part of the sales slump that got a "special price" as soon as I showed interest. (In a dying retail store, but the Amazon disease is too tangential just now...)
I have to rate it as the least useful computing device I've owned in many years. I spent quite a while trying to find some application wh
Re: (Score:2)
In other words, a solution in search of a problem?
Re: (Score:3)
They found a solution. Like the PowerPC Macs before them, they are great for students because they don't even run software that schools don't want. No effort required to keep them clean even if the student would really try.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you were going for Funny, but the trolls with mod points overruled you. Looking at the ongoing moderation abuse, I'm already tilting towards another hiatus from Slashdot... Last one was a year, but I'm sure I took a longer one of several years a while back.
So far I've been hanging around looking for a fit for a couple of technical topics on my mind, but the offerings in the stories have been so meager and the discussions so vacuous... I was also hoping for a URL for a better discussion website, and
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know if you've seen the hardware that schools are buying under the Chromebook banner, but they are hardware as slow as a 10 year old Core i5. They stay on a short refresh cycle with cheap slow hardware because they'll get beat up or replaced multiple times in a span anyway.
Re:Don't count on it... (Score:5, Informative)
Even the more recent elearning/digital coursebook offerings I've seen from Ed publishing leave a lot to be desired. We really are better off without them. You can do wonderful things with teachers that have been sufficiently trained in how to use LMS' to teach & that have the appropriately developed digital resources but that's about as common as unicorn poop. Even if you count rhinos as unicorns, that's still pretty rare.
However, there's likely to be a bit of inertia & belief in sunk cost fallacies, i.e. we've bought this stuff so we'd better use it. In modern classrooms, it's still hard to beat good ol' fashioned textbooks, pencils, & notebooks, & teachers teaching kids facts & how to do stuff with them. If that idea catches on, there'll be no need to repair or update Chromebooks(TM).
I still have a C720. (Score:3)
I still have a Haswell-based Chromebook. It was a bit long in the tooth in 2016 when I bought it and it's only barely useful now. I don't plan on replacing it with another Chromebook though. While they've become somewhat hackable again in the last few years, there is no longer a cost advantage to doing so. The Windows tax and the Chrome tax are more or less the same cost now.
They hurt education (Score:5, Interesting)
Ruined reputation (Score:3, Informative)
If only Google hadn't ruined Chromebook's reputation so badly among kids. My sweet little niece had one all through grade school, a plastic piece of garbage. I offered to buy her a top of the line, $1200 and she didn't even want it for free.
Kids hate those things.
Not just the hardware... (Score:3)
ChromeOS is crap. Basically any other OS is going to be more useful, and everything ChromeOS can do can be done by other OSes. So ChromeOS is a strict subset of the more useful platforms.
Schools like them because they are inherently ephemeral and limited, but limited in ways a person doesn't want to inflict on themselves. The forced ephemeral nature may appeal to some users, but they can self-impose those same limitations on other platforms if they so desire, and a lot of times the on-device stuff on other
I love refresh cycles (Score:4, Interesting)
I use 3-5 (or even 7) year old Chromebooks for amateur radio and other simple dedicated tasks. Of course, first I install a real OS on them. Device support in recent Linux kernels is good, although you still need to check compatibility before buying. There is plenty of them on eBay, and great deals can be had on Craigslist locally.
This is kind of a Raspberry Pi use case and price range . You don't get the GPIO header, but you get x86 compatibility and built in keyboard, display, and other peripherals.
Re: I love refresh cycles (Score:3)
You can buy Chromebooks that arenâ(TM)t made by Google, they are basically cheap PC with an i3 or Atom processor. Itâ(TM)s not the CPU but the surrounding cost shavings that are the culprit of poor performance, things like using an MMC or SD card for boot drive despite having SATA/NVMe or slower/older RAM, swap it out with proper spec and you get a useful system.
Start selling them cheaper (Score:2)
I think Chromebooks can be neat devices. I have a Lenovo Duet which I've had for 3 years now. It is basically a MS Surface style device with a keyboard, trackpad and touchscreen which is small enough to toss into a backpack for an overnighter and didn't cost a whole lot. A fraction of the price that a Surface would. It's great for taking notes (even has a cool stylus), browsing the web, answering email, watching videos etc. I bought it because it was cheap, and my particular use case wanted something cheap