Qualcomm cancels its miniature Windows on Arm PC

Qualcomm has canceled its Snapdragon Dev Kit, the miniature Windows on Arm PC that was originally supposed to ship in June. In an email to customers, Qualcomm said the mini PC “has not met our usual standards of excellence” and orders will now be refunded.

Qualcomm has been struggling to ship the mini PC for months now, after originally planning to release it in June alongside the chips that powered the first wave of Copilot Plus PCs. Beyond the mention of not meeting standards, Qualcomm doesn’t explain why it took months to reach the conclusion of canceling the hardware before it shipped to most people.

Some developers, like Jeff Geerling, already received their Snapdragon Dev Kit before Qualcomm’s cancelation. Greeling even performed a teardown on the hardware and fully reviewed it, too. The conclusion of the review was that while this mini PC had similar performance to Apple’s M3 Pro, the hardware was a missed opportunity thanks to a lack of Linux support and weird restrictions on being able to resell the device.

The mystery around why Qualcomm has canceled this device might all come down to an HDMI port. While the dev kit was supposed to ship with an HDMI port, Geerling found that all the chips are in place for an internal DisplayPort to HDMI conversion, but the port is missing. Richard Campbell, founder of the DEVIntersection set of conferences, speculated on a recent TWiT episode that the HDMI port may have caused production delays if it failed FCC compliance testing. Qualcomm also emailed people who ordered the dev kit last month to let them know they were planning to ship the device with a USB-C to HDMI dongle instead.

While the dev kit is a niche device, it was supposed to be a key piece of hardware to help developers port their apps to Windows on Arm. Both Microsoft and Qualcomm have been pushing developers to get their apps ready for Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops, and they’ve had some success in getting apps like Chrome native to Arm64.

Google is even bringing its Drive app to Windows on Arm later this year, NordVPN and ExpressVPN both launched last month, and the Arc browser is now Arm64 native. This gradual adoption of Windows on Arm should be a success story, but the dev kit fiasco has overshadowed it. Qualcomm is now holding a Snapdragon summit later this month, and it may need to tease more about its Snapdragon plan for desktop PCs now that its mini PC adventure is over.