Every Chromebook that has ever hit the market has a built-in “end-of-life” date, meaning that once that date is reached, updates won’t hit the machine anymore. It’s a definite downside but by providing another year of software support, Google has just extended an olive branch to almost every Chromebook.
Google’s support page lists the EOL dates for each Chromebook, and those dates come up relatively quickly for quite a few. Earlier this year, Google gave some extra time to several Chromebooks from Lenovo, including the popular C330 and that was expanded to many other models.
Google updated that support page this week to study the EOL dates of a whopping 135 different Chromebooks from different manufacturers. Android Police has a great side-by-side comparison of how the date of each Chromebook has changed, but nearly every model has been given a one-year extension. Some added only a few months, though, while a couple added up to two years.
It includes, among other items, some of Google’s own Chromebook models. The 2015 Chromebook Pixel will now be updated by June 2021, while the short-lived Pixel Slate will be supported by June 2026 for another two years. We bet you have something to do with the Pixelbook Go and its almost identical internals.
It’s not clear why Google suddenly decided to start giving all of these Chromebooks a new lease on life with extended support for apps, but it’s definitely not something to worry about. Hopefully, Google will ultimately only provide better support for these machines indefinitely.
