You do realise that Asus, Lenovo, HP, etc... sell Chromebooks, right? Google sells very few branded as a 'Google' product.

The numbers are out there, but Google isn't releasing numbers because they're a tiny vendor.

You mean Google does not know exactly how many Chromebooks are being sold by Asus, Lenovo, HP, etc?

They probably do, but all those are public companies. They all report sales a certain way. Google isn't going to mess with reporting sales that other companies are making. That's irresponsible.

No. Why would they? You think Asus, Lenovo and HP are giving sales data to Google?

They do know about Android activations, it's not so far fetched.

All the Chromebooks phone home regularly checking for updates, etc. Google knows exactly how many have been used and are in use now.

I don't have a Chromebook, but I think you have to sign into a Google account to use a Chromebook, so surely they have the numbers?

You can use it in guest mode without a Google account or other authentication. I don't remember if you need to explicitly set it up to do that, though.

I'm sure Google has the numbers since the Chromebooks/Chromeboxes auto-update (part of the whole point, really) so given that they likely have unique device IDs (or ethernet MAC addresses), the 'live devices count' would be rather easy to figure out.

"Chromebooks in Q3 2013 had at best a 1.2 percent share of the PC market and a 0.76 percent share of the combined PC-tablet market."

Latest IDC figures show Chromebooks continue to struggle http://www.zdnet.com/article/latest-idc-figures-show-chromeb...

Q3 2013 is a long time ago. According to NPD, Chromebooks had 14% market share in 2014, counting retail and commercial (read: education) channels. Growth was up 85% year over year, too, which is amazing in the context of a stagnant/declining laptop market.

http://betanews.com/2015/02/24/2015-is-year-of-the-chromeboo...

NPD is a less reliable source covering a much smaller market (not that any of them are reliable).

Chromebook sales are about 1% of all PC sales, says ABI Research http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/22/chromebook...

Different source, different paper, different journalist, same conclusion.

The idea that Chromebooks sell in volume is delusional, at this point, and downvotes won't make it any less delusional.

You can spin it all sorts of ways. Keep in mind the 'PC' market includes all those legacy Windows XP computers which are languishing in peoples homes, businesses, corporations, etc...

Chromebook sales are a much bigger part of current PC sales. And vendors do keep expanding their Chromebook lines. If it was a failure they wouldn't.

The "PC market" refers to current sales. "Installed base" is the term for the metric that includes the languishing WinXP machines.

Ah yeah you're right. The 1% came from some guy extrapolating Samsung's sales of Chromebooks to mean the whole Chromebook market...

Some guy being a professional journalist who actually made some effort to analyze the numbers.

I appreciate from the downvotes above that some people prefer to believe what they want to believe ;-)