Earlier this year, we told you about the launch of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X developer's kit and while the mini PC was never intended for home users, we still wanted to get hold of one, if only to see how good an Arm-based gaming machine we could make it. Alas, that's never going to happen now as Qualcomm has decided to "pause this product and the support of it, indefinitely" because it "comprehensively has not met our usual standards of excellence."
News of the decision was reported by Ars Technica which had, in part, learned of the move via Jeff Geerling, a software developer. Geerling had picked up one of the dev kits in early October but was decidedly less than impressed with it. Inside the sleek little box is a Snapdragon X Elite processor, clocked 100 MHz higher than those used in Copilot+ laptops.
Along with 32 GB of LPDDR5x RAM and a 512 GB SSD, there's a range of connectivity options (Wi-Fi 7, USB4, etc) and, specifically, a HDMI socket to hook it up to a monitor. Except when Geerling unboxed his sample, he was surprised to note that in its place, Qualcomm dropped a USB-to-HDMI dongle in the box.
Digging into the system itself, Geerling discovered that Qualcomm had designed for there to be an HDMI port present, including all of the necessary circuitry and signal converter chips, but clearly changed its mind late on the production of the dev kits. He also immediately noticed that his system was clearly labelled with 'Evaluation only; not FCC approved for resale.'
The general consensus appears to be that Qualcomm couldn't get the whole HDMI thing to work properly to pass FCC requirements, hence the stamp on the case and the dongle in the box. Either way, it didn't say much for Qualcomm's engineering.
Somewhat bizarrely, Qualcomm also chose to ship the dev kits with Windows 11 Home installed, which nixes developer-favoured features. One can upgrade the licence, of course, but if you're paying the best part of $900 for a device that's purely aimed at developers, one would naturally expect any software to be appropriate for its use.
None of that matters now, as Qualcomm has issued a full refund to anyone who has already purchased one and said that the hardware doesn't need to be returned. That puts those who do own one in a bit of a tricky position, as the FCC stamp clearly states that it technically can't be resold.
All of this means that if you fancy developing an application or game for a Snapdragon X-based Windows laptop, then you'll just have to go out and buy a Copilot+ device. But given that Qualcomm is hoping to make a big dent in AMD and Intel's share of the laptop processor market with its Snapdragon X series, not properly supporting developers isn't going to help matters.
And it may just give Nvidia and MediaTek the opportunity to step in and snatch the Arm-based laptop sector right from under Qualcomm's nose.
