As the PC market keeps slowing down, there are a few segments still generating some growth, such as the Chromebooks for example. The shipments of these devices grew by an impressive 38% in 2016, compared to 2015. And now Gartner is predicting another growth, this time by 16.3% in 2017.
Gartner estimates that 9.4 million were shipped in 2016, compared to the 6.8 million from 2015. This is of course just a small part of the 270 million PCs moved last year. By the way the whole PC segment shipments declined by 6.2%, showed the same analysts. IDC also predicted that Chromebook shipments will grow by double digits in the following years.
For 2017, the shipments are said to reach 10.9 million units, which is a bump of 16.3% from last year. In 2018 Google and its partners will ship 11.9 million units, which is another 8.6% increase. The majority of Chromebooks are being shipped to classrooms in USA, Nordic countries, Australia and New Zealand. They have also expanded to areas like finance and retail.
Interestingly, the product hasn’t yet become big in Asia. Still, it’s big enough to spook Microsoft, that debuted Windows 10 S to counter Chrome OS.