Update - September 26 : Today my Dev Kit finally arrived! And of course, the first thing I did was tear it downâcheck out my teardown photos of the Snapdragon Dev Kit internals here .
Update 2 - October 17 : Today Qualcomm cancelled all remaining orders, and will no longer support the Dev Kit .
I signed up to buy a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Dev Kit the second I found out about it. It's supposed to be the Mac mini killer for Windows .
They even promoted it with this amazing-looking transparent shell , and I and hundreds of other devs were ready to pony up the $899 Qualcomm was asking.
Their pre-order form said it would be out June 18. Almost exactly one month later, I got an email saying it was available. Great!
So I went to the purchase page on Arrow ... and it showed as out of stock. That was about 15 minutes after receiving the email.
There were three possibilities:
- They vastly underestimated the demand, and/or there was a crush of orders immediately upon launch.
- They didn't actually have any for sale yet.
- They didn't coordinate with Arrow on the launch timing, so Arrow didn't show any stock yet.
In any case, I was surprised to see they had stock the next day (Tuesday). Well... at least it said "In stock: 1 part".
Since the order page said "Ships in 1 day", I placed an order, hoping to receive a dev kit by the end of this week.
I'm glad I didn't pay for overnight shipping, though, because Wednesday, the shipping date on my order slipped from Thursday to... June 12, 2026 ! I bemusingly documented the saga on Twitter/X:
lol 2026 estimated ship date now pic.twitter.com/aZpRIuSHvW
— Jeff Geerling (@geerlingguy) July 17, 2024
I'll update this post as the shipping date changes over time. As of late Thursday, Arrow's product listing says: "5 parts: Ships in 2 days", and my order now says "Est. Ship: 14 Aug 2024".
August is a little more reasonable than 2026, but I wonder how many units Qualcomm produced, and whether they completely whiffed on their estimate of how many people would want a Snapdragon Dev Kit.
I originally planned on putting the X Elite through its paces in early July, measuring efficiency and testing Linux on it. Linaro's been working on Linux support for the Snapdragon X , but according to the few people I've seen testing it on X Elite laptops, there are rough edges.
I posted a video testing some other things on Arm Linux , where I think hardware support and compatibility is in a better state than Windows on Arm, despite Microsoft's massive marketing campaign around 'Copilot Plus' and 'Redefining the PC'... you can watch that video here: