Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

"I'm hopeful for Microsoft's future on ARM, but either Qualcomm needs to get their act together, or Microsoft needs to pour money into some other chipmaker to optimize for Windows. Otherwise, the vast gulf between ARM SBCs on the low end and Apple's custom Silicon on the high end will persist."

Part of it is... what on earth is Qualcomm thinking with their pricing? Every PC that has had a Windows on ARM processor is priced like a premium machine, while running slower than the competition from Apple, Intel, and AMD (though Project Volterra is the best value by far, so far).

It's like Qualcomm has decided that high-end Snapdragon parts may only appear in $1000+ devices, perhaps to prevent people from asking questions about the cost of their chips in phones. (If a Snapdragon Gen 8 appeared in a $500 laptop, why couldn't it be in a $500 smartphone? Especially important, because of legal filings, Qualcomm uses the total sale price of the device for some royalty calculations IIRC.)

Yeah, Qualcomm is behind the M1, but the funny thing is that Qualcomm is already ahead of a lot of the Intel product lines, if they were willing to compete at the lower end of the PC market.

For example, why does the Surface Go 3 still sell with a "Core i3" or "Pentium Gold 6500Y" in it, when it could have this Qualcomm chip in it. Qualcomm's Gen 8 is approximately 3x faster while also being lower cost and having lower power draw! Why does a $500 Go 3 ship with "4GB Ram" and "64GB eMMC" when this Qualcomm devkit can ship with 32GB ram and 512 nVME SSD for just $100 more? These are the products that should be Qualcomm-ified, it would be an immediate improvement to people buying this, over any other current PC comparable.

Instead, the consumer version of this Windows devkit is a "Surface Pro 9", which when equivalently spec'd to the devkit, comes out to $1900 USD. At that price, nearly any Intel / AMD / Mac comparable is a way better pick.

> Instead, the consumer version of this Windows devkit is a "Surface Pro 9", which when equivalently spec'd to the devkit, comes out to $1900 USD.

It seems likely that this machine is being sold at a loss. That's why things aren't being Qualcommified.

To your last comment - the royalty on ASP is capped. Apple had argued in court over this with claims that shoving more storage into a phone led to more licensing fees which was not the case. I can't speak to whether the pricing on this dev kit would be below the cap or not, I forget the rough range of the caps (in the mid $100's if my memory serves me right)

Agree on the weird pricing strategy though. My take is that they're trying to milk the relationship because Windows is a relatively premium brand. Competing interests for sure that Windows is looking for a wider audience on the low end while Qualcomm wants the $$ from high end.

They seem to believe that the extra battery life of the Snapdragon when running ARM software justifies the price premium, when most consumers would be mostly running x86/x64 software in emulation. The reviewers pick up on that point, consumers continue to buy x64 devices, and the Windows ARM ecosystem remains largely undeveloped.

Qualcomm and Microsoft's unwillingness to invest in growing the ecosystem is very troubling. What was the point of the timed-exclusivity agreement to begin with, if not to invest in the ecosystem?

Qualcomm is also trying too hard to encourage cellular in laptops. It makes no sense to pay extra upfront and $20/month for 5G on a laptop.

I don't get the push for cellular modem in Laptop either. Who is actually asking for this, since most of us have could just tether off our existing phone or use a wifi hotspot, and wouldn't, like you mention, need to pay an extra $20/month.

plus you could blow past your monthly cap in a heartbeat at the data rates these days

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