Your Chromebook will soon gain a neat trick borrowed from Pixel phones

ChromeOS has a new feature that has been popular on Pixel phones and could make your Chromebook last longer. The new software feature is part of ChromeOS 134.

While there’s a range of updates in ChromeOS 134, it’s the battery charge limit that’s getting the attention of the ChromeOS subreddit (via Digital Trends). Limiting the charge of the battery is a popular option, as it’s one of the top ways to preserve battery health.

Batteries don’t last forever and can often be the culprit that ages your device, is a battery that fails or decays through overuse. The best way to use one is to charge it and let it run down before you charge it again. And batteries don’t like being fully charged and don’t like being kept at full charge.

This new feature will let you set a charge limit on your battery to 80%. It's a feature that’s available on Pixel phones, having arrived in the December update to Android 15. And it’s not unique to Pixel – other manufacturers have similar solutions, either limiting the maximum charge allowed, or scheduling the charging to match usage patterns, so the device isn’t sitting on full charge for many hours.

Fully charging increases the strain on the battery, along with increasing the heat, which can lead to faster degradation of the battery’s ability to give and receive a charge. You might notice if you have a fast-charging phone, that the first half of the battery charges much faster than the second half – and that’s a similar control system designed to manage battery health.

It doesn’t just apply to phones and laptops – electric cars do exactly the same thing, which is why you’ll notice that charging speeds are given as 0-80% (where the fastest charging happens) rather than over the last 20%, which is intentionally slower, to preserve the health of the battery.

Back to Chromebooks and this move means that if you leave your laptop connected to the power all the time, you’re not going to have that battery constantly strained, so it will last longer.

The details also highlight that administrators will be able to manage this across a fleet of devices – so if you’re in a school IT department for example, where the Chomebooks are generally stored in a charging state, you can limit the battery charge level to make them last longer.

ChromeOS 134 will soon be rolling out, with the stable version released on 4 March 2025.