This is exactly the kind of argument I'm trying to burn to the ground in the second part of my comment above (see "nerd niche itch"). You write this, thinking that you're revealing some uncomfortable truth that the bubbleheads don't understand. But the real truth is that Chromebooks are killing.

The penetration Chromebooks have made in education is huge. And even if it were an entirely no-profit/break-even situation, the idea of millions of students and public library patrons doing work on a "Firebook", and that it would be a serious contender to Windows-based PCs in a number of IT departments, is so perfectly aligned with Mozilla's ideals that it makes me sick to think about, especially juxtaposed with the hundreds of millions that Mozilla Corp has thrown away in the go-nowhere endeavors that it did pursue.

That is an US phenomenon, there are hardly any queues of people buying Chromebooks outside US, let alone having them on display.

He wasn't talking about consumer purchases - he was talking about education.

Still an US only phenomenon, I haven't seen anyone in education related domains with a Chromebook, specially since in Europe it is up to the students to care for their own hardware, as consumer purchase.

If I am reading this article correctly, it looks like the %/market that Chromebooks have managed to capture in the field of education is large worldwide.

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3058517

Ah, one of those Gartner studies that companies buy from 2015, yet we don't see them on the stores.

When we do happen to see one, if it is a store we visit regularly, what we see is the same device on display being discounted to death until the store finally manages to get rid of it.

I must have seen around 5 like that, so I don't get where Gartner is getting their values from.

I'm all for skepticism of statistics, but you're offering an anecdote to refute it...

It might be an anecdote, but apparently it is one shared by the majority of European HNers.

So where are those units that Gartner states were sold over here?

The plural of anecdote is not data.