Has the bubble finally burst for Chrome OS or is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
Chromebook sales have been growing since the first models appeared all the way back 2011. But when the pandemic hit in 2020 sales began to surge and peaked this summer with nearly 12 million units sold. Despite this massive success, it appears the market has reached its saturation point, and the latest reports show shipments of Chromebooks are down by 37% compared to last year, a drop of over 3 million units.
Earlier this summer it seemed that Chromebooks were unstoppable. Between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021 Chromebook sales climbed a staggering 275%, quadruple the growth of all other notebooks on the market.
The surge in growth beginning in the Q2 of 2020 was fueled by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shipments of Chromebooks jumped 50% from around 4 million units to over 6 million in three months. By the end of Q1 2021, Chromebook’s market share had doubled from 9% of the notebook market to 18%.
Much of this growth can be attributed to Google’s dominance in the educational market. Low price points coupled with ease-of-use led to Chromebooks occupying nearly 60% of the K-12 market in the US in 2018. And with the onset of the pandemic “[m]any schools and governments blew out their budgets to provide devices for remote learning and even consumers aggressively purchased devices for learning in 2020,” according to Anuroopa Nataraj, a research analyst from IDC.
By investing so heavily in the educational market, Chrome was bound to reach a saturation point sooner rather than later. And now that schools are opening their doors and students are returning to the classroom, the demand for new devices has fallen.
So, is the sky falling on the Chromebook market? Are Android-equipped laptops waning like the crescent moon? In a word: no. According to Canalys, many schools are still waiting on money from the Emergency Connectivity Fund. The ECF is over $7 billion made available by the US government to schools and libraries to be spent on devices to ensure equity in education.
In addition to this, Chromebook vendors are pushing into the enterprise market with the full support of Google behind them. If Google can pull off the same trick in the business world that it did in American classrooms, we’ll be hearing a lot more about Chrome OS devices going forward.
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