Chromebooks very popular in 2020, tablets also saw growth

Chromebook sales remained high during the last quarter of 2020. The Chrome OS based laptops were sold more than 11 million times, with a total of more than 30 million laptops sold throughout 2020.

This is what analyst firm Canalys writes in a report. With this, sales increased by 287 percent compared to the same quarter in 2019. The PC market in general also did well in 2020, growing by 17 percent to a total of 458.2 million devices sold.

Corona pandemic

The popularity of Chromebooks is due to the corona pandemic. Students had to stay home, and schools quickly tried to find a technical solution. Chromebooks proved to be excellent for the cause. The education sector has always been a very strong market for Chromebooks, so the acceleration here isn’t all that surprising.

The most popular Chromebooks were from HP, which managed to sell 3.5 million of the laptops. That is an increase of 235 percent compared to the previous year. Lenovo saw a larger growth of 1766 percent, but total sales remained stuck at 2.8 million. Dell, Acer and Samsung also saw considerable growth.

Tablets extremely popular as well

Tablets have also benefited from the demand for school-related devices. A total of 52.8 million of these devices were sold in Q4 2020. Of the tablet manufacturers, Apple saw the greatest success, shipping 19.2 million iPads. This is a growth of 41 percent compared to the previous year. Amazon and Lenovo managed to sell 6.5 and 5.6 million tablets respectively. Huawei saw a decline of 24 percent, presumably due to the trade war between the U.S. and China. In total, the tablet market grew by 54 percent.

Windows 10X

Microsoft also seems to want to capitalise on the success of Chrome OS. The company is working on developing a greatly reduced version of Windows 10, called Windows 10X. From the first leaked images, this operating system looks very similar to Chrome OS in terms of both appearance and functionality. Microsoft is probably planning to use it on cheap laptops as well.

Tip: Chrome browser in ChromeOS receives fingerprint support