Chromebooks are very popular as a first laptop for children and teens these days, they are cheap many can be had under 200$ and they provide basic office and apps/games especially now with the play store.
Effectively Chromebooks are the new "EEE PC"/netbook which were also very popular with children and teens as they were chip as dirt which meant that they were often bought as a gift or when a child needed a 2nd computer to take with them.
So when you have devices that cost 199 it's not that surprising that they outsell devices that cost 899 and upwards.
If the "premium" chromebooks outsold MBP's/MB's it would be as much as a surprise to me as why would anyone want to put a Core i7/i5 CPU and upto 16GB's of RAM in a chromebook in the first place.
I love my Chromebook, with Crouton you can run Debian on it and for the most part don't have to worry about wonky drivers and the like. I currently work as a Sysadmin and I don't want to carry $800+ dollars of hardware with me while I'm up in ceilings running cable. It allows me to spend my downtime writing code so I can get into development one day. I get over a full day on a single charge. Great little machine. I'd consider one of the premium ones for my next laptop.
Yeah well you are a "unique" case, I would be surprised if even 10% of Chromebook owners knows what Crouton or chroot is :)
HN users don't see Chromebooks because HN users are a very special subset - highly educated and well paid which works in development and IT at large.
If you look at children and low wage blue collar workers you'll see many more of them those are the people that buy what one would not even consider a budget laptop but an entry one.
Those are also the people for whom Google and Facebook are defacto the internet, I've recently met people that didn't knew "Office" even existed outside of Google Docs.
If you are high school student that only wants to get access to Facebook and maybe be able to write a small paper you don't need more than a Chromebook.
If you are a truck driver or a security guard that wants to be able to read email or watch YouTube you don't need more than a Chromebook.
And for those people a 150-250$ device makes all the sense in the world.
College students would probably still be able to use a Chromebook for 99% of their tasks, but since Apple has a student discount it's chic Apple most likely will still continue to rule the College class.
There are a few people in my office (web dev shop) that have Chromebooks. With a little tinkering to open them up, they're perfect.
I mean really, 99% of the time all you need is a web browser and a connection to remote into the machine that's doing the real lifting for you.
My favourite part is the disposability. If it gets trashed or stolen, all I have to do is sign in to a new chromebook and generate new keys to be back up and running.
My little sister is now 14, and Kubuntu is for her easier to use than ChromeOS ("why can’t I put this there? Why doesn’t that software run? What? I can’t have other programs?" – I installed ChromeOS for her on her laptop for a while).
The major difference between a Ubuntu and a ChromeOS install is that one of them has a lot of marketing, the other doesn’t.
Effectively Chromebooks are the new "EEE PC"/netbook which were also very popular with children and teens as they were chip as dirt which meant that they were often bought as a gift or when a child needed a 2nd computer to take with them.
So when you have devices that cost 199 it's not that surprising that they outsell devices that cost 899 and upwards.
If the "premium" chromebooks outsold MBP's/MB's it would be as much as a surprise to me as why would anyone want to put a Core i7/i5 CPU and upto 16GB's of RAM in a chromebook in the first place.