Qualcomm discontinued the Snapdragon X Elite development kit as the product failed to meet Qualcomm’s usual standards. The company has announced a refund to all buyers, including those who received the item a few days ago.
Qualcomm canceled its development kit, Snapdragon X Elite, just a few days after the first unit shipped. According to reports, the reason for the takeback was the failure to meet Qualcomm’s regular standards. The $899 development kit was first announced at Microsoft’s Build 2024 conference earlier this year.
Qualcomm revealed in a mail sent to customers that “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 its support indefinitely.”
The designed chip aimed to help developers build apps for Windows on Arm. The Snapdragon chip prioritized efficiency over performance. It offers amazing battery life in Windows on Arm laptops giving competition to Apple’s silicon chips, though it falls far behind in performance compared to normal desktop chips.
Qualcomm intended to launch the Snapdragon X Elite kit in June, making order possible on the same day Coplot+PCs became available. However, the days have gone and Qualcomm failed to put the developer kit on sale.
The first set of pre-ordered products was sent a month before, with an estimated two weeks delivery time. The customers who placed the order found that the product wouldn’t be shipped in the estimated time.
There were no updates from Qualcomm regarding the date when the developer kit would ship, making many customers frustrated.
A message received to preorders last month notified some hardware issues, saying the dev kit’s built-in HDMI port was replaced with a USB-C-to-HDMI dongle and was offering a 10% discount to customers as acknowledgment.
Tearing down the received product revealed both the space on the board where an HDMI port was supposed to be, an unusual HDMI converter chip, and an internal display connector that the port would have been connected to, all indicating the removal of the port occurred late, which can be the reason for the delay in delivery earlier.
As of now, to test and develop using an Arm system, one has to use Copilot+Laptop or tablets. But these systems can’t beat the price advantage of the dev kit, whose starting price is $899. Getting a similar CPU and RAM as that of the Snap Dragon X elite process requires $2100 for a Surface Pro tablet though some laptops like HP Omnibox X can be bought for a price of $1000 according to the current promotion scenarios.
The dev kit was supposed to be a niche device that helps developers port their apps to Windows on Arm.
Microsoft and Qualcomm were already setting up developers to get their apps ready for Snapdragon X elite-powered laptops, and they also won in getting apps like Chrome native to Arm 64.
Even Google was on a merge to transform its Drive app to Windows on Arm later this year. As a precursor, Node VPN and Express VPN were launched last month, and the Arc browser is turned to Arm 64 native. The unexpected failure of the dev kit has turned down the adoption of Windows on Arm, which could have been a success.
However, many are still hoping for better since some X2 elite chips have been spotted testing at Qualcomm, believing that the company would apply its learnings on the Snapdragon X elite kit to make it a strong mini PC compatible to compete with next-generation SoCs. Qualcomm is planning to hold a Snapdragon summit later this month, which may portray glimpses of updates on their new plans.
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