With all we know about the upcoming Chromebook ‘Kevin’, there are a few puzzles left to solve. While there’s a chance that some of those pieces will remain a mystery until we hear an official announcement and/or see a product shipping, we are still searching like crazy for any nugget of info we can find.
This latest bit gives us high hopes that we can know the actual release window for ‘Kevin’, and if our suspicions are correct, this is very good news indeed!
According to multiple commits linked just below, one thing is a clear constant between them all: ‘Kevin’ is being tested with Chrome OS R54 (release-R54-8743.B specifically). This is a sampling of the commits out there that show this devices clearly being tested with R54:
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/c/381676/
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/381074
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/381191
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/381093
Additionally, we have this list of patches pulled from ‘Gru’ and ‘Kevin’ for other projects, further lending credence to this theory:
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/q/status…branch:release-R54-8743.B-chromeos-4.4,50
Here’s where we take that info and get a release window. As you can see from this Google Help page, Chrome OS gets larger updates about every 6 weeks. Meaning and update from Chrome OS 52 to Chrome OS 53.
What we can conclude, then, is that ‘Kevin’ will likely be released with Chrome OS 54. Right now, R54 is in the Dev channel, but will be hitting the Beta channel in a few weeks as R53 makes it’s way to the Stable Channel. Once we see R53 hit the Stable Channel, we can know that R54 will arrive about 6 weeks later in Stable.
Based on this, lets look at the calendar together. We are likely to see R53 hit the Stable Channel very soon. Most likely this week or next week based on the schedule. R52 hit the Stable Channel on July 27, 2016. Today marks exactly 6 weeks from that date, so it is safe to assume R53 will hit Stable very soon, indeed.
A quick example of this in motion is the release of the Acer Chromebook R13. In all of the commits around ‘Elm’ we saw R53 being used to test. Acer announced the R13 and said available in October. The window for R53 in the Stable Channel, from what we established above, is September 7th – October 19th. This puts an October release right in the window we would expect.
So let’s use this logic for ‘Kevin’. We can extend these dates out and see the R54 window will likely be from October 19th – November 30.
So we feel quite confident that ‘Kevin’ will see a release sometime in November. Holiday season. Turkeys. Santa. And Kevin.
Happy Holidays!
