Digitimes, the Taiwanese IT news outlet, has an interesting Chromebook teaser up today. According to ‘sources’ there’s a bit of a fight breaking out among the big OEMs. Acer, HP and Samsung are to “launch new products to defend their market shares” while Dell, ASUS and Lenovo are looking to increase share. ASUS, it’s said, is to launch ‘many’ different models in Q4 2014.

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Watch this figure: 18%. It’s the percentage of sub $300 laptops sold in the USA in the third quarter that were Chromebooks. Why is it significant? Because that was the ‘back to school’ period and if the Q4 figure is anything less than 18% you’ll know who’s buying Chromebooks from retail channels in the USA.

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Chromebooks hit 1 million sales in Q2 of this year and we expect that number to rise sharply after the Q3 ‘back to school’ numbers are in because that’s where Chromebooks appear to be having their biggest impact. 42% of Chromebook sales are in the reseller space.

In a presentation at the Intel Developer Forum last week we saw Intel’s vision for Chromebook differentiation. Obviously they highlighted all their platform advantages including media decoding, low power states, fast start, wake-on-wireless and wake-on-voice.  Intel also highlighted the security model that most of us are at least aware of by now. It’s that, Power-Wash and remote management that appear to be attractive for businesses, education and even the health sector.

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In a report issued yesterday, iSuppli is predicting that 45 million SSD, cache SSD and Hyrid HDD solutions will ship for Ultrabooks and ultrathins in 2013 indicating a huge 4X jump over 2012. Isuppli is predicting that despite a contraction of the PC market but that a flattening off of interest for ‘superthins’ will ‘take-off’ in the second half of 2013.

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