Where is Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit?

Jul 19, 2024

Update - September 26: Today my Dev Kit finally arrived! And of course, the first thing I did was tear it down—check 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.

Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit Transparent

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:

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:

Further reading: