The chip giant didn't give much explanation about what prompted the delay and the eventual cancellation.
Qualcomm has canceled its upcoming Windows Mini PC, the Snapdragon Dev Kit, in what could be a blow to some Arm developers.
The $899 Mini PC wasn't intended for general use, but to help developers develop Windows applications that were natively compatible with chips manufactured by semiconductor giant Arm.
Arm's chips power the vast majority of the world's smartphones, excluding those manufactured by Apple, which switched to its own silicon in 2023.
However, Arm's engineering was mostly absent from Windows laptops, with these instead generally using CPUs from AMD and Intel, at least up until fairly recently.
But things are changing, and Acer, Dell, HP, and Lenovo have announced Arm-based laptops in 2024, including a new Lenovo ThinkBook powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus eight-core processors.
The chip giant did not provide any reasons for the move other than saying that the Snapdragon Dev Kit "has not met our usual standards of excellence" in an email published on software developer Jeff Geerling's blog.
All customers who pre-ordered the device are set to get a refund from Qualcomm, but it's still unknown if those who already received the device will get any of their money back according to the email.
The device was originally pegged for a June 2024 release, but missed that deadline. It's unknown what specifically caused the delay, followed by the cancellation. However, The Verge does have some theories on what could have caused the mystery delay.
When Jeff Geerling reviewed the device for the website, he found even though all the necessary chips were in place, the Mini PC was missing an HDMI port
Tech expert Richard Campbell, who founded the DEVIntersection conference series, speculated on a podcast that the device's port could have been responsible for production delays if it didn't get past the FCC's compliance testing.
For developers interested in building on Windows on Arm, there are plenty of options outside of the Snapdragon Dev Kit.
In 2022, Microsoft released the Windows Dev Kit 2023.
The developer box, which uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform, also enabled developers to build Windows apps on the Arm architecture.