September 30, 2021

Demand for Chromebooks dropped by over 50 percent in a month since July. Notebooks are expected to be affected for the rest of the year by the COVID-19 pandemic and changing demand from businesses.

Trendforce said that interest in ChromeOS-powered laptops last year was primarily due to the prevalence of remote learning, with rising vaccination rates in North America, Europe, and Japan during the second half of 2021 expected to be the cause of the slowing demand for Chromebooks.

Because Chromebooks represent a “relatively high share” of HP and Samsung’s total laptop shipments, OEMs’ shipments are expected to shrink by 10 to 20 percent from the first half of the year to the second half.

Still, Trendforce still predicts a total of 36 million Chromebooks will be shipped in 2021.

Overall, Trendforce predicts laptop deliveries will rise 16.4 percent year-on-year for a total of 240 million systems in 2021.

Laptop shipments in the fourth quarter are also expected to get a boost from people upgrading to Intel’s next-gen CPUs or Windows 11, which debuts next week. However, the final numbers will also be influenced by where the world is with the COVID-19 pandemic.

By 2022, vaccination should become even more widespread, and Trendforce expects laptop shipments to decline 7 to 8 percent year-on-year to a projected 220 million units, still an improvement from the 160 million units shipped in 2019 before the pandemic began.

For more information, read the original story in Ars Technica.