Google is working to bring Adaptive Charging to Chromebooks

While we wait for battery technology to get better, phone makers have been implementing new features aimed at preserving your battery life. Samsung does so by allowing you to limit how much your phone can be charged, while Google has opted for an Adaptive Charging feature. Essentially, this makes it so that your phone will charge slowly overnight, and ramping up so your phone will still reach 100% when you wake up. By doing so, this is designed to help your phone’s battery last for longer, improving the device’s longevity.

According to a new Chromium Gerrit commit, as spotted by 9to5Google, it seems that Adaptive Charging may finally make its way to a Chromebook near you. The official description of this feature reads as such:

Minimizes the amount of time the device spends at full battery to preserve battery lifetime.

It’s something that we don’t really think about all that much when it comes to our laptops and Chromebooks. Usually, you either just keep your laptop charged up all of the time while using it at your desk, but we never really let the battery completely drain for one reason or another. By using Adaptive Charging, this would presumably do the same thing, extending the life of your Chromebooks battery.

But this would still work differently than how Adaptive Charging works with your smartphone. This is because we don’t charge our laptops on a regular or consistent basis, as it just depends on how you’re using the computer. So Google will have to make use of Machine Learning to attempt to charge at a different rate than just providing as much power as possible to get your Chromebook charged as quickly as possible.

• Google quietly implements new feature to extend Pixel battery life

9to5Google also found references to a notification that would appear when Adaptive Charging is active. Plus, Chrome OS would include settings that would allow you to turn off the feature altogether, which would come in handy for those who need to get as much juice as possible, as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, there’s no indication as to when this feature could land on a stable version of Chrome OS, let alone whether it’s something that we would even see in the Canary channel. Perhaps Google is just working on a new defining feature for an unannounced Pixelbook, as the Pixelbook Go is getting a bit long in the tooth at this point.