Qualcomm announced that it has canceled the Snapdragon Developer Kit with Windows on Arm operating system, which was planned to be released in June. In an email to customers, the company stated that the mini PC “does not meet its usual standards of excellence” and announced that orders would be refunded.
Qualcomm has had difficulty bringing this mini PC to market for months. The device was planned to be available in June along with the first wave of Copilot Plus PCs. However, the reasons for the cancellation of the hardware were not fully explained. Qualcomm only stated that the device did not reach the expected quality standards, but did not share any details as to why the cancellation decision was taken so late.
Some developers managed to receive their devices before Qualcomm’s cancellation decision. One of these names, Jeff Geerling, examined and disassembled the hardware of the Snapdragon Developer Kit and published a comprehensive evaluation. According to Geerling’s review, the mini PC was on a similar level in terms of performance to Apple’s M3 Pro processor. However, the lack of Linux support and restrictions on the resale of the device led to the conclusion that this hardware missed an important opportunity.
Problems with the HDMI port may be the reason behind the cancellation of the device. While the dev kit should have come with an HDMI port, Geerling noticed that the hardware had all the chips to convert DisplayPort to HDMI, but the HDMI port was missing. Richard Campbell, founder of DEVIntersection conferences, suggested in a TWiT program he recently attended that this port may have caused production delays if it did not pass the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) compliance tests. Qualcomm sent an email to people who ordered the device last month, informing them that it planned to send a USB-C to HDMI dongle instead of the HDMI port.
Although this development kit only appealed to a certain audience, it was seen as a key piece of hardware for developers to adapt their applications to the Windows on Arm platform. Both Microsoft and Qualcomm are encouraging developers to prepare their applications for laptops with Snapdragon X Elite processors. There have been some successes in this regard, such as the Arm64 version of Chrome.
Qualcomm may soon announce new plans
On the other hand, Google’s Drive application is also coming to the Windows on Arm platform this year. Additionally, while NordVPN and ExpressVPN took their place on the Arm64 platform last month, the Arc browser is now Arm64 compatible. This slow but steady growth of the Windows on Arm ecosystem could be a success story, but the cancellation of the dev kit has overshadowed this process. Qualcomm may have to give new clues about its Snapdragon plans for desktops at the Snapdragon Summit later this month.