Chromebook demand doubled last year

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic caused massive frustration, drove significant changes in various markets and accelerated a lot of trends. With millions of people forced to work and learn from home, there's been a big spike in laptop sales. One of the interesting things is that demand for Chromebooks exploded in 2020.

New figures from Canalys reveal the Chromebook market more than doubled from 14.7 million laptops in 2019 to 30.7 million units in 2020. Towards the end of the year, the figures were even more dramatic. In the final quarter of 2020, Chromebook sales topped the 11.2 million mark, representing almost fourfold growth versus the 2.9 million units shipped in Q4 2019!

Lenovo was the biggest winner with 1766% annual growth. The Chinese manufacturer shipped just 0.2 million Chromebooks in Q4 2019 -- this exploded to 2.8 million units in Q4 2020. HP remains the market leader with 3.5 milion units shipped in Q4 2020, an annual growth of 235 percent.

Breaking down that number, Lenovo was the biggest winner. The company still fell short of HP’s 3.5 million units shipped, but the 2.8 million Lenovo Chromebooks shipped in Q4 2020 represented a massive 1,766% growth. Samsung, Asus, Acer, and Dell all saw steady, triple-digit growth as well during the pandemic but didn’t gain any traction compared to competitors. Canalys Research Director Rushabh Doshi said:

Demand for Chromebooks is through the roof. With many countries being forced to accelerate their digital education plans in the wake of additional lockdowns, schools and universities are clamoring for easy to deploy solutions and Google’s digital offerings for education are proving quite popular over rival platforms, especially in the US and Western Europe. With governments in many countries racing toward a much needed 1:1 device to student ratio, Chromebook demand for education is expected to remain strong through 2021. Outside education, there has also been mounting interest from consumers and traditional commercial customers in seeking out Chromebooks to ensure affordable continuity of business or personal computing.

Besides being great for educational use cases, Chromebooks are also ideal for anything-web related. You can't run Windows apps on Chromebooks of course, but anything that runs in Chrome works even things like ace pokies online. You're even able to play AAA video games on the Chromebook via services like NVIDIA's GeForce NOW. More at 9to5Google.