Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite chips have been the star of many AI PCs released in 2024, significantly improving performance and battery life compared to their previous generation iterations. However, the manufacturer’s recent attempt to improve one of the negative points has not yielded any results.
Qualcomm has canceled its dev kit, a Snapdragon mini PC powered by Windows on Arms. It was originally scheduled for a June 2024 release window, but that was completely missed. Now, as part of an official announcement, Qualcomm has stated that the kit has been canceled because it “does not meet our usual standards of excellence.”
Interestingly enough, The edge saw that several developers had already received the mini PC, including YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who reviewed the product and performed one detailed hardware disassembly of it. Although Qualcomm did not provide specific reasons for why the PCs were canceled, the conclusions from Geerling’s review are that, despite matching the performance of the Apple M3 Pro, there is no Linux support and there are restrictions on reselling of the device.
There’s also another theory for the cancellation, which comes down to the HDMI port – or lack thereof. Although the mini PCs shipped all came with chips for internal DisplayPort to HDMI conversion, the actual port was missing for some reason.
According to Richard Campbellfounder of DEVIntersection, the HDMI port could have been the cause of the massive delays if it failed FCC compliance testing. This seems to be backed up by the fact that Qualcomm emailed everyone who ordered the PC in September saying they would receive a USB-C to HDMI dongle with their development kit.
But what does this mean for the consumer?
One of Qualcomm’s most well-known drawbacks is that Windows on Arms still has compatibility issues with some Windows programs, tools, and apps. The manufacturer has improved this by leaps and bounds to the point that the average user wouldn’t know the difference, but for gamers and others using specialized programs, these compatibility issues can be quite difficult to analyze.
In comes the Qualcomm mini PC development kit, which would have been the perfect tool for developers to port their apps to Windows on Arms. This could potentially have introduced a host of apps into the operating system that would otherwise never have seen the light of day on Arm chips. This is especially important for consumers who have been left in the dark due to the lack of app support for tools they need themselves, which in turn limits Qualcomm’s sales of its AI PCs to them.
And with fellow competitors from the industry Intel and AMD are going to work together To form the “x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group” in response to Qualcomm and other competitors, the latter should figure out how to fix the issues with the dev kits, or figure out some other way to solve these app compatibility issues if it Arms wants to see it continue to flourish.