Qualcomm has discontinued its Snapdragon Dev Kit, the miniature Windows-on-Arm PC that was originally scheduled to ship in June. In an email to customers, Qualcomm said the mini PC “did not meet our usual quality standards” and orders would now be refunded.
Qualcomm has been struggling to ship the mini PC for months, having originally planned to launch it in June alongside the chips that powered the first wave of Copilot Plus PCs. Aside from mentioning that standards weren't met, Qualcomm doesn't explain why it took months to come to the conclusion of canceling the hardware before shipping it to most people.
Some developers, like Jeff Geerling, already received their Snapdragon Dev Kit before Qualcomm's cancellation. Greeling even did a teardown of the hardware and fully inspected it as well. 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 due to a lack of Linux support and strange restrictions on reselling the device.
The mystery as to why Qualcomm discontinued this device could be due to an HDMI port. While the development kit was supposed to ship with an HDMI port, Geerling noted that all the chips are there for internal DisplayPort to HDMI conversion, but the port is missing. Richard Campbell, founder of the DEVIntersection conference series, speculated in 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 development kit last month to let them know that they plan to ship the device with a USB-C to HDMI dongle instead.
Although the development kit is a niche device, it should be an important piece of hardware to help developers port their apps to Windows on Arm. Both Microsoft and Qualcomm have been pushing developers to make their apps for laptops powered by Snapdragon
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 phased rollout of Windows on Arm was supposed to be a success story, but the Dev Kit fiasco has overshadowed it. Qualcomm is now hosting a Snapdragon summit later this month and may have to announce more about its Snapdragon desktop PC plan after its mini PC adventure is over.