chromebook: Less people are buying Google Chromebook laptops: Report

NEW DELHI: After witnessing growth for five consecutive quarters, the global shipments of Chromebooks and tablets recorded their first decline since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. According to the latest report by research firm IDC, the Chromebook shipments declined 29.8% year over year in the third quarter of 2021 (3Q21) with volumes dropping to 6.5 million units while tablet shipments recorded a 9.4% year-over-year decline falling to 42.3 million units.
Reason for the decline in Chromebook and tablet segment
The IDC report reveals that the increased spending in other categories weakened the demand for Chromebook and tablets. The decline also stems from the comparison to a strong third quarter in 2020 when consumer device shipments peaked.
“Many schools and governments blew out their budgets to provide devices for remote learning and even consumers aggressively purchased devices for learning in 2020. As a result, some saturation in the education market is expected in the near term,” said Anuroopa Nataraj, senior research analyst with IDC’s Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers.
Top five Chromebook companies
In the Chromebook market, Lenovo emerged as the leader and shipped the highest volume with 1.5 million shipments. The second and third position in the list is captured by Acer and Dell with 1.4 million and 1.2 million units shipped respectively. HP managed to grab the fourth position with 1.1 million shipments and Samsung occupied the fifth slot with 0.6 million shipments.

Top five companies in the tablet segment
Apple continued to lead the segment with 14.7 million shipments and captured 34.6% market share. Samsung captured the second sport with 7.5 million units, followed by Amazon with 4.7 million units shipped. Lenovo came in 5th place with 4.3 million units and Huawei came in with 2.3 million units.

“Tablet sales grew in the last year due to many factors, including their versatility, component shortages on the PC side, and a comparatively lower selling price. Despite the slowdown in demand, commercial use of tablets in verticals such as logistics, healthcare, and banking is expected to persist as the pandemic has changed the way many of these businesses conduct day-to-day operations,” adds the report.