Researchers from Canalys claim that hardware manufacturers sold 30.7 million Chromebooks by 2020, the best year ever of the platform. Thus, Google’s productivity platform accounted for more than 10 percent of all personal computers sold last year.
“Demand for Chromebooks is skyrocketing,” Canalys research director Rushabh Doshi said in a prepared statement. ‘As many countries are forced to accelerate their digital education plans as a result of additional closures, schools and universities are looking for solutions that are easy to implement, and Google’s digital education offering is very popular on competitive platforms, especially in the USA and Western Europe. ”
According to Canalys, hardware manufacturers sold a record 11.2 million Chromebooks in Q4 2020, the best quarter ever for the platform, and more than four times the sales recorded in the previous quarter. And they will sell 30.7 million Chromebooks in all of 2020. Canalys puts the total size of the computer market at 297 million units sold by 2020, and I reach a similar figure, 288.9 million units, by data from Gartner and IDC to calculate. Either way, Chromebooks accounted for more than 10 percent of all personal computers sold in 2020.
HP was the top seller of Chromebooks with 3.5 million units sold in the fourth quarter, Canalys said, and sales rose 235%. Lenovo was in second place with 2.8 million units sold and 1766 percent (!) Growth. Acer and Dell both shipped about 1.5 million units. And Samsung ended up in fifth place with just over one million sales units, up 630 percent.
Canalys says demand for Chromebooks is expected to remain strong until 2021. The company also helps businesses on the platform see growing interest from outside the education market, including consumers and traditional commercial customers looking for ‘Chromebooks to ensure affordable business or personal computer continuity.’
Canalys also noted that the tablet market also experienced strong growth in 2020, with an overall high of 52.8 million units in the fourth quarter and 160.6 million units in 2020; the latter figure is 28 percent higher than in 2019. Apple sold nearly 20 million of these tablets, the best performance for iPad since 2014. (Interestingly, this reflects the computer growth experience in 2020 almost exactly, where sales were higher than any year since 2015.) Samsung (9.9 million units), Amazon (6.5 million), Lenovo (5.6 million) and Huawei (3.5 million) round out the top five.