With recent news of the has been shut down its development kit.
As it appeared, Qualcomm has decided to cancel its Windows PC development kit on ARM, or the Snapdragon X Elite Developer Kit. The Verge says that refunds are still being processed, and the availability of this product has now been suspended, while support for this particular kit has been ceased.
A question of quality
The May 30th e-mail to consumers from Qualcomm cited the move as resulting from quality concerns. The company explained that the mini PC “was not up to par with the standards that we deliver our clients” and as such the company has decided to stop selling and supporting the product, permanently. Due to this, it is worth to acknowledge the fact that some kits have been delivered to consumers already. People get wondered whether the latter will be also reimbursed.
Delays and speculation
Originally, this kit was planned for a June release, along with the chips that brought the first Copilot Plus PC to market. However, Qualcomm has not offered an explanation as to why it could take over a month to decide that the product should be cancelled. Furthermore, the developer Jeff Geerling also got the kit and wrote his opinion about that, noting that there is no Linux suppport and restrictions on reselling the kit. It also found that the unit did not have an HDMI port, though it had all the chips that would be required for internal conversion of DisplayPort to HDMI.
Consequence on application development
Be it the pandemic-induced issue or some other problem, this kit was supposed to be instrumental in getting developers ready to bring their apps to Windows on ARM. In fact, Microsoft and Qualcomm were nudging developers to get their applications ready for Snapdragon X Elite laptops. This cancellation could therefore be quite large and even likely to retard the production of applications for this platform.
