Google has told Chromebook owners that a machine bought today will receive software updates until 2034. The company's support policy for Chromebooks promises ten years of updates. 2034 is eight years away.
The date appears in a support document titled "What the Googlebook announcement means for your ChromeOS devices".
Googlebooks are Google's replacement for the Chromebook, the web-centric laptop it launched in 2011. The new range uses more powerful processors and runs a new operating system, Googlebook OS, with the company's Gemini assistant built in.
So far Googlebooks have been launched only for consumers. None of Google's five current Googlebook hardware partners designed a first model for the education market or other fleet buyers, and those five, along with many other manufacturers, carry on producing Chromebooks.
Gemini is built into Googlebook OS at the operating-system level, and Google is keen to see the assistant succeed as the industry's AI land grab continues.
That matters because Chromebooks have been taken up heavily in schools, where the appeal is a low price and an operating system nobody on site has to manage. For a school, the support window is most of the purchase: it decides how long a machine can stay on the trolley before it becomes a tray.
A device bought in 2026 and supported to 2034 receives eight years of that window.
The discrepancy cannot be a typing error, because both figures are published by the same company about the same product, and a typing error requires one of them to be wrong.
This newspaper accepts both. Once the ten and the eight are held fixed, the only quantity left free to vary is the year.
On that reading a Google decade is eight of our years, a Google year is 0.8 of a calendar one, and the support document and the support policy have been in perfect agreement all along.
The conversion holds up elsewhere. Chromebooks launched in 2011, which is fifteen calendar years ago and just under nineteen Google years, a figure that better reflects how long ago 2011 feels to anyone who has used one.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has asked whether the rate applies across the rest of the product line, and in particular whether a Googlebook sold with a ten-year warranty will reach the end of it in time for the next one.
Schools buying a Chromebook this term will get the full ten years of support they were promised. They will get them by 2034, in the only unit in which the promise is true.