NEW DELHI: Earlier this year, Qualcomm, the company known for making mobile chipsets unveiled the Snapdragon Dev Kit, a mini Windows on ARM PC that was supposed to launch back in June alongside the first Copilot Plus PCs. In an email to customers, Qualcomm said that the mini PC did not meet “our usual standards of excellence” and that customers who purchased it would be refunded. To give you a quick recap, the tech giant has been struggling to ship the Snapdragon X Elite powered Windows on ARM mini PC for a couple of months.
However, the company did not specify why it took so much time to conclude that the Snapdragon X Elite mini PC did not meet its expectations. According to The Verge, a handful of users have already received the PC, with one developer named Jeff Geerling saying that while the PC performs similarly to Apple’s M3 Pro chipset, the lack of Linux support and restriction on being able to resell it made it unpopular.
He went on to say that a possible reason why Qualcomm cancelled the PC may be because of an HDMI port. The Snapdragon dev kit was originally to ship with an HDMI port but was missing from the final product. The Snapdragon Dev Kit was powered by the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-00-1DE, which is slightly faster than other processors in the series.
While the company has said that several Snapdragon X Elite-powered Windows PCs will be coming to the market in the next few months in various form factors, those PCs won’t be made or sold by Qualcomm. With both Qualcomm and Microsoft pushing developers to port their apps to Windows on ARM, the Snapdragon Dev Kit was one of the key pieces of hardware that would help ease the process.
In the last few months, PC manufacturers like Dell, Lenovo and Microsoft have already jumped on the Snapdragon X Elite bandwagon, with the chipset finding its way onto some of the best laptops of 2024.
Agencies