Now that decent Arm-powered PCs exist, Qualcomm’s CEO wants to make them cheaper

Enlarge / Microsoft’s Arm-powered Surface Laptop 7. We’re still waiting for Arm chips to make their way into cheaper PCs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

For the first time in the decade-plus that Microsoft has been trying to make Arm-powered Windows PCs happen, we’ve finally got some pretty good ones. The latest Surface Pro and Surface Laptop (and the other Copilot+ PCs) benefit from extensive work done to Windows 11’s x86 translation layer, a wider selection of native apps, and most importantly, Snapdragon X Pro and X Elite chips from Qualcomm that are as good as or better than Intel’s or AMD’s current offerings.

The main problem with these computers is that they’re all on the expensive side. The cheapest Snapdragon X PC right now is probably this $899 developer kit mini-desktop; the cheapest laptops start around the same $1,000 price as the entry-level MacBook Air.

That’s a problem Qualcomm hopes to correct next year. Qualcomm CEO Christiano Amon said on the company’s Q3 earnings call (as recorded by The Verge) that the company was hoping to bring Arm PC prices down to $700 at some point in 2025, noting that these cheaper PCs wouldn’t compromise the performance of the Snapdragon X series’ built-in neural processing unit (NPU).