From ARN from IDG:
In a slowing PC market, Chromebooks siphoned market share away from Windows PCs in 2016 as their popularity grew outside the education market.
Chromebook shipments grew by a stunning 38 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. Gartner estimated 9.4 million Chromebooks shipped, compared to 6.8 million units in 2015.
The number is just a fraction of overall PC shipments, but growth came in an otherwise down PC market. Overall PC shipments in 2016 were about 270 million units, a decline of about 6.2 percent, according to Gartner.
Looking forward, 2016 may go down as the best year ever for Chromebook shipment growth. Gartner is estimating shipments to continue growing in the coming years but at a slower pace.
[...] Analyst firm IDC has also predicted Chromebook shipments will grow by double-digit percentages in coming years. Most of the Chromebooks are shipping to classrooms in the U.S., Nordic countries, Australia and New Zealand.
There is also growing interest in Chromebooks from businesses in the finance and retail sectors. Companies are using Chromebooks as no-frills mobile thin clients, considering they are cheap to deploy and easy to manage, said Mikako Kitagawa, an analyst at Gartner.
Yes, Microsoft would definitely like a piece of this segment of the market; whether the Surface Laptop, with its hobbled OS, is good enough to make that happen for them, is anyone's guess.
PC sales have been declining for years, a situation which was only exacerbated by Microsoft's high-profile Windows 10 giveaway (a giveaway which isn't actually over yet, although its profile is certainly lower), so the fact that Chromebook sales are up by 38% is more than merely significant. This looks like a huge shift from from Windows PCs and towards any viable alternative; one has to wonder if Apple could be reaping more reward from this same shift if they weren't so busy dropping the ball with their own laptop line.
It remains to be seen whether consumers will be willing to accept Microsoft's anti-consumer Win10 S bullshit in ordet to get cheaper laptops. The fact that Microsoft has already backed off the $49 fee to upgrade from Win10 S to Win10 Pro, at least for the rest of this year, speaks volumes about Microsoft's own confidence about that happening.
What we are seeing already, though, is that consumers really aren't waiting for Microsoft to get their heads out of their asses; they're looking for alternatives, and anyone who has their shit together can probably make a lot of hay out of Microsoft's disarray. Makers of Linux laptops should take note; if they're wanting to be one of those alternatives, it's probably now or never.