Back in early 2020, as the covid pandemic drove classrooms online, school districts found themselves needing to bulk purchase affordable laptops that they could send home with their students. While Google currently guarantees eight years of automatic updates to Chromebooks, that period officially begins when Google certifies a Chromebook — not when a school actually gets that Chromebook in hand, which is a process that can take much longer. Reached for comment, Google spokesperson Peter Du provided the following statement to The Verge: “We’ve worked diligently with our hardware partners to increase the years of guaranteed support Chromebooks receive, and since 2020, we now provide eight years of automatic updates, up from five years in 2016