How to Find the End-of-Life Date of Your Chromebook
At some point, all of our stylish new devices will become old and decrepit. Warranties expire, hardware improves, and companies only support their products with software or firmware updates for a limited period of time. To help you determine when your Chromebook reaches its end of support date, Google will soon be adding this information to the Chrome OS settings menu.
To check the expiration date of your Chromebook when you launch a feature, open the Settings menu, then choose About Chrome OS> More Information. The end of support date will be listed in the “Update Schedule” section .
We are currently using Chrome OS version 78.0.3904.92 and do not see this feature live yet. However, a member of the XDA Developer Forum saw this feature in the Canary version of Chrome OS, which (hopefully) means it’s coming soon.
We would like more companies – and more Google products – to apply this kind of transparency, but for now it’s great that Google at least gives its Chromebook users a clearer idea of how long their devices will receive updates.
While we’re on the subject, here are a few things to look out for when it comes to operating system updates and support times for almost every device or OS:
- A device’s lifespan starts from the date it was originally launched, so you won’t have a full support window if you buy an older device.
- The specific lifespan varies by device and operating system, but Google generally supports Chrome OS devices for approximately 6.5 years after its public release date. However, companies can constantly change these support windows .
- You can still continue to use your Chromebook – or indeed any device with any operating system – even after the support window has passed; you just won’t get any additional features or other updates.
- There are sometimes exceptions to these rules, especially if a serious security bug is found that needs fixing even if the device is no longer actively supported – the recent Windows 7 BlueKeep updates are a prime example .