Companies should do what they say they're going to do, but these dev kits are an example of something that's relevant to HN but not to Qualcomm's business.
A large part of the success of this new platform is how fast devs can adapt / fix their apps to work natively. Apple, for instance, provided dev mules for OSX ARM --- and their rollout of Apple Silicon was smoother than anyone could have hoped.
Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now.
> Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now.
Internally, nearly 20 years. It was kept alive for a long time by a single individual as a side project. When I first got out of college I actually helped update tests that were being used for it (I maintained the ARM compiler test harness, and it was being used for some Windows on ARM stuff as well).
Microsoft has never went fully in on arm, whereas Apple was willing to burn bridges and start brand new.
Snapdragon laptops have been available for a few weeks already. Although laptops cost more than this dev kit they're also more usable as a daily driver. If Qualcomm wants real adoption they'd send them out for free, not require devs to pay.
Dev shops would rather not have piles of laptops with batteries to maintain sitting in their racks/shelves for build and remote testing.
For individual devs laptops are fine, usually, but there's also no solid "reference" platform, since all the laptops are targeting different consumer lines.
That's a bit beside the point though, the Dev kits should've come out months before the consumer products were launched... and failing that at the same time.
Qualcomm and Arrow said the units would ship "tomorrow" in July... and it took over a month (after accepting many orders) before they even updated the stock to a more realistic timeframe, late September.
Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now.