X / YYY Chromebook models are on version ZZZ exactly
X / YYY models are still on a prior version and X / YYY models are already on a later version
XX models have already received their final update and are not included
Battery charge optimizations help extend the useful life of your Chromebooks
With reduced education funding, many schools are now looking to extend how long they keep their Chromebooks from 4 to 5 or 6 years. An important factor is the device fleet's battery health. Once a significant portion of batteries need to be replaced, it may make sense to start looking at overall fleet replacement.
With the DevicePowerBatteryChargingOptimization setting, you can now select different charging strategies for your devices to help optimize for longevity:
Always charge to 100% at maximum speed - This is the standard charge strategy and will give you the longest battery life every day. However, this is the worst choice for battery longevity, i.e. how quickly the batteries will lose capacity over time.
Limit charging to 80% - This can significantly increase the battery longevity, potentially allowing you to keep your original batteries for additional months or years, but with reduced battery life each day.
"Adaptive charging" (charge to 80%, then slowly charge to 100% based on users' charging habits) - In theory, this gives a balance of both strategies. We're not sure exactly how this would work in practice for school devices, though, given the unpredictability.
Check the battery health on your existing devices to see what you should do
Using Google Admin Console you can see an individual device's battery health, but if you want to look across hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands), we can help with a full device health check.
New settings & recommended configuration
Isn't it annoying to find and configure each of these new policies one by one in Admin Console? We're building a tool that will instantly audit these policies for you and provide a 1-click button to set all of them at once. Get in touch to try a beta version
Instinctive
