What does that mean for you?
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite chips have been the star of many AI PCs released to market in 2024, greatly enhancing performance and battery life compared to their previous gen iterations. However, the manufacturer’s recent endeavor to improve on one of its negative points hasn’t panned out.
Qualcomm has canceled its dev kit, a Snapdragon mini-PC powered by Windows on Arms. Originally, it was planned for a June 2024 release window but missed that entirely. Now, as part of an official announcement, Qualcomm has stated that the kit has been canceled because it “has not met our usual standards of excellence.”
Interestingly enough, The Verge spotted that multiple developers had already received the mini-PC including YouTuber Jeff Geerling, who reviewed the product and performed a detailed hardware teardown of it. Despite Qualcomm not providing any specific reasons for why the PCs had been canceled, the conclusions from Geerling’s review are that despite it matching the Apple M3 Pro’s performance, it lacks Linux support and had restrictions around reselling the device.
