Qualcomm just squashed its own desktop ambitions

Qualcomm has been on a tear with its Snapdragon X Elite CPUs in Copilot+ laptops, but the company is struggling to expand beyond the initial lineup. Just days after the first orders arrived, Qualcomm has abruptly canceled its Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows and promised refunds to developers who had ordered the mini PC.

We first heard about the Snapdragon Dev Kit in May, when Qualcomm announced it alongside the release of Copilot+ laptops. It was a part of Qualcomm’s ambitions on desktop Windows PCs, and Windows PCs more broadly, as it would allow developers to toy around with the most powerful Snapdragon X Elite CPU available — the X1E-00-1DE, which isn’t available on any consumer device and has over 100 watts of power at its disposal.

May turned into June, and finally, in July, orders for the kit went live with retailer Arrow. YouTuber Jeff Geerling placed an order then, with promised that the dev kit would show up the next day. It didn’t. The shipping timeline slipped into September, and it looks like Geerling was one of the first to get a dev kit at all. Just two weeks after getting the device, Geerling received an email from Arrow:

“The Developer Kit product comprehensively has not met our usual standards of excellence and so we are reaching out to let you know that, unfortunately, we have made the decision to pause this product and the support of it, indefinitely.”

In the comments, multiple users said they received the same email on the same day, or within a few days of, the dev kit showing up in the mail. Geerling already had a chance to test out the dev kit and found it surprisingly capable, though disappointing as a developer-only product. The intent of a developer kit like this is to give hardware to software developers in order to make apps for Windows on Arm as Qualcomm tries to court developers to bring apps from x86 over to Arm.

It’s not clear why Qualcomm made the move. In June, the company made it clear that it has ambitions far beyond laptops, and the developer kit was a step in that direction. Maybe Qualcomm struggled to get its chips under control in a high-performance setting, or perhaps the cost of producing the kit wasn’t worth it to the company. Regardless of the reason, the cancellation is a major setback for the company.