Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said during the company’s 3Q24 earnings call that the company will launch $700 Snapdragon X PCs by next year. This is exciting news for those looking for budget options, as the most affordable Snapdragon X laptop right now is the $999 Microsoft Surface Pro or Microsoft Surface laptop.
“As we look forward to 2025, in addition to new design wins, our X series product roadmap will expand to address PCs with retail prices as low as $700 without compromising NPU performance,” said Amon (via The Verge).
While you can get the Snapdragon X chip for less than $900, it’s in the form of a mini-PC desktop dev kit focused on programmers and developers building apps for Windows on Arm. It’s also not widely available yet, so you’ll have to sign up for the wait list if you want to get your hands on it. It isn't portable either, so can't boast of one of the Snapdragon X's main advantages - long battery runtimes.
We have no information as to what underlying changes will facilitate $700 Snapdragon X-powered computers. It is easy to assume that this affordable device could be another laptop with a few specs trimmed, as both Intel and AMD offer some of the best sub-$1,000 gaming laptops on the market.
However, we can also look at Apple’s products when considering Snapdragon X computers, especially as they’re being compared against MacBooks when it comes to battery life. For example, the $999 price point for the most affordable Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptop puts it in the same league as the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air.
But if you look at Macs that go for less than $1,000, your two options are the $599 Mac mini with 256GB storage or the $799 variant with 512GB. So, it might make sense for Qualcomm to partner with a manufacturer to create a Snapdragon X-powered mini-PC to take on these sleek little boxes.
Aside from the $700 Snapdragon X PC announcement, Amon also said that we will see more Qualcomm-powered computers at IFA, expanding the list of Microsoft Copilot+ PCs available from the initial launch.
“We expect PC to be the next biggest driver of diversification for the company,” says Amon. Business will be “slow and steady as the market transitions,” he admitted, but we already see some good signs coming out of the woodwork. Amon said that some Snapdragon X PCs have already sold out, while Geekbench also posted on X that 6.5% of Geekbench 6 benchmarks from June 15 to July 15, 2024, were also run on Snapdragon X devices — good signs for Qualcomm, especially as it had launched less than a month before that.
You might notice, though, that Qualcomm’s latest earnings report does not include its laptop business yet. The company says it’s too early to include the numbers yet; but with sales slowly but surely ramping up, we expect Snapdragon X chip to be a significant part of its business in the coming years.
