Qualcomm has suddenly and quietly discontinued the $899 Snapdragon X Elite Developer Kit, with the company refunding customers who bought the device since it went on sale. It’s unclear if those who already received their devices will also get refunded. The chip-making giant built this $899 mini PC for developers to help them build apps for Windows on Arm.
According to the letter that developer Jeff Geerling received, Qualcomm said, “…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 the support of it, indefinitely.”
Geerling and others who purchased the device previously pointed out that there had been long wait times for the device with little explanation as to what was going on.
The Snapdragon X chips are focused more on efficiency than performance. While it allows Windows on Arm laptops to have amazing battery life that finally lets Windows devices compete against the legendary efficiency of Apple Silicon chips, it falls flat in the performance department when compared to proper desktop chips. The variant in the dev kit, the X1E-00-1DE, had a slightly higher dual-core boost clock than the top retial version. An X Elite dev kit was pushed beyond 100 watts, and the reviewer discovered that you’re using up four times more power but only get up to 30% more performance.
By time customers started receiving their PCs, the retial laptops had long been on shelves, largely defeating the purpose of having a machine to build for the latest Snapdragon chips.
At the moment, you can only get these chips on laptops and a couple of tablets, but Qualcomm said that Snapdragon is coming to all PC form factors, including desktops. Because of this, all is not seemingly lost for a desktop Windows 11 on Arm device, and we might still get a Snapdragon X mini-PC, but from an OEM instead. Aside from that, some X2 Elite chips have been spotted being tested at Qualcomm — hopefully, the company will apply its learnings on the Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit to make a powerful mini-PC sporting these next-generation SoCs.
