News Qualcomm fires back at Intel's claims of high return rates — the company says Snapdragon X PCs are within 'industry norm' for returns

[Admin]

Qualcomm reacts to Intel's claim about the high return rate of Snapdragon X-powered PCs, saying everything is within industry regular and customers enjoy the systems.

Qualcomm fires back at Intel's claims of high return rates — the company says Snapdragon X PCs are within 'industry norm' for returns : Read more

 

[Amdlova]

First adopters of this product will grab on the hand of x86 God or will follow the path of evil with apple products. Windows with arm is the pure nightmare.

 

[dimar]

I predict that Qualcomm products will be abandoned by Microsoft in about 3 years.

 

[IBM296]

Every reviewer has praised the hardware of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops (from the battery life to thermals, to camera performance compared to X86 laptops ).

Software compatibility is what's stopping people from jumping to Arm on Windows. In the next year or so when Microsoft and Qualcomm have ironed out software issues and Nvidia also enters the Arm race, a lot more people are going to switch to Arm.

RIP X86

 

[Pierce2623]

It’s hilarious hearing Qualcomm doing this posturing when ARM is poised to rug pull Qualcomm’s entire business.

 

[Notton]

I assume they are playing with the numbers and split the returns from dissatisfied with defective.
So defect rate is industry norm, but dissatisfied.

Also, when you look at user reviews, they are next to non-existent with snapdragon laptops. Not a 1, not a 5, but a unrated.

 

[jheithaus]

People don’t want the devices. It’s classic MSFT treating their customers like crap. They place snapdragon front and center at Best Buy with no warnings. I suspect INTC speaks the truth. Half of the consumers have no idea what they bought and are upset when their grandson complains the laptop plays zero games. Lunar lake is just as efficient with the software support.

 

[ekio]

First adopters of this product will grab on the hand of x86 God or will follow the path of evil with apple products. Windows with arm is the pure nightmare.

Ridiculous.

Saying x86 is better than arm is like saying CRT is better than LCD.

The only reason why x86 is more convenient in some cases is because it’s old and well established. Otherwise ARM tech is better on every aspect (tech quality, license, evolution…)

 

[bit_user]

I predict that Qualcomm products will be abandoned by Microsoft in about 3 years.

That seems unrealistic, to me. Microsoft has been partnering very closely with Qualcomm, on numerous products, for the better part of a decade. Microsoft is also using ARM in their cloud. I really don't see them turning back.

With fewer and fewer new apps being natively-compiled, the CPU ISA will only become less of an issue, not more of one. However, x86 will have a long tail and MS will have to keep improving its x86 emulation.

 

[bit_user]

one can only wonder whether customers dissatisfied with a system due to software incompatibilities or crashes will waste more time rating a PC that did not work for them.

Are you kidding? Frustrated consumers are the most likely to leave a scathing review! The problem companies usually have is that contented customers are less likely to bother leaving reviews.

Anyway, if Intel keeps talking trash about Snapdragon X PCs, it will lower expectations and paradoxically result in even more pleasantly-surprised consumers who will leave good reviews. So, I'm not sure that spreading FUD is exactly a brilliant strategy.

 

[bit_user]

It’s hilarious hearing Qualcomm doing this posturing when ARM is poised to rug pull Qualcomm’s entire business.

Qualcomm has the best lawyers and ARM's case isn't exactly bulletproof. The fact is that Qualcomm currently has no short-term choice but to forge ahead with their ARM-based products, so they need to throw all their weight behind them.

Long term, you're right. They've been saying things about RISC-V and working on using it in niche products for years. However, the wise sales person sells what they have today. Pitching what you'll replace it with would only cause market confusion and result in more people sitting on the sidelines.

 

[bit_user]

Saying x86 is better than arm is like saying CRT is better than LCD.

Good analogy. In the early days of LCD monitors, good CRTs were in fact better than LCDs in most respects.

The only reason why x86 is more convenient in some cases is because it’s old and well established. Otherwise ARM tech is better on every aspect (tech quality, license, evolution…)

Yeah, but Snapdragon X is still ARMv8-A and lacks SVE. Without that, it's at a disadvantage on vector computations.

 

[Adrin997]

As a IT leader at a medium size company we are testing several Snapdragon devices from Dell, Lenovo, & Microsoft.

As someone who has now for a few months been testing a Surface laptop 7(13.8”) and Lenovo Slim 7x, these perform beautifully and the battery life is amazing.

We initially had compatibility issues with Sophos AV, Palo Alto, KACE, and few others. All now have ARM support!
I will be putting an order before end of year for 100 surface laptops and 100 surface Pro’s.
These are for work and yes games may not work great on these but we are working and these devices are great to get work done without worrying about battery life.

Yes we did test a few Intel Lunar Lake devices and they were subpar when compared to the snapdragon devices. We had some issues with performance, glitches with windows for some reason and just not as good. Also Intel is abandoning lunar lake.

So all the negative comments make me think these are people without the means or snapdragon devices making negative comments. But none of these companies care about you it’s just profits so why sound like you are protecting your own company. Competition is great and if Intel wakes up and starts making great processors again people will pivot to them again. This year we are putting our toe in the Snapdragon pool. But not stupid enough to just change all our devices.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I can completely believe that ARM based laptops have a higher percentage of returns than x86, but when x86 sells hundreds for every one ARM it makes those percentages sound worse than they are.

 

[kin_yalbets]

My Qualcomm Copilot + PC is the first Windows Laptop I've had in years that I consider usable. Intel and AMD dropped the ball badly staying focused on power towers. My Lenovo 7x is a pleasure to use and was easily half the price of my MacBook with the same storage and RAM - with an OLED touch screen no less. Is ARM under Windows still a bit rough around the corners? Yes. That said the fixes and upgrades have been coming in steadily and I'm finding no deficiencies at this time. I'm not a gamer but am doing some fairly sophisticated development. I am really glad to have a decent Windows laptop as WSL with Docker Desktop is a great environment for doing development. The NPU is great but somewhat limited in its capabilities to run LLMs at this time. Microsoft is working on some ports that will leverage the NPU more effectively and are promising a SDK early 2025. I see ARM and Qualcomm coming to some sort of agreement soon as they posture their lawyers. I'm not sure what to think of Intel but I hope they can get their act together. I would take the negative comments with a grain of salt as most are probably from people that haven't purchased or used a Qualcomm Copilot + PC.

 

[r00tb33r]

It’s hilarious hearing Qualcomm doing this posturing when ARM is poised to rug pull Qualcomm’s entire business.

Indeed.

Hopefully they're working on Risc-V designs.

 

[ezst036]

I can completely believe that ARM based laptops have a higher percentage of returns than x86, but when x86 sells hundreds for every one ARM it makes those percentages sound worse than they are.

Very good point.

 

[Co BIY]

People don’t want the devices. It’s classic MSFT treating their customers like crap. They place snapdragon front and center at Best Buy with no warnings. I suspect INTC speaks the truth. Half of the consumers have no idea what they bought and are upset when their grandson complains the laptop plays zero games. Lunar lake is just as efficient with the software support.

"Plays zero games" might be a marketing angle for parents buying for kids!

 

[usertests]

The problem is that nobody bought these overpriced bricks in the first place.

 

[OneMoreUser]

I assume they are playing with the numbers and split the returns from dissatisfied with defective.
So defect rate is industry norm, but dissatisfied.

Also, when you look at user reviews, they are next to non-existent with snapdragon laptops. Not a 1, not a 5, but a unrated.

Why do you make that assumption?

It is hardly that Intel have a great track record of honesty about their own products, why would you presume they are to be trusted when it comes to a competitor and a potential life threatening at that?

As for user reviews, there are hundreds if not more when you look at Amazon. Maybe you haven't heard of Amazon.

 

[bit_user]

"Plays zero games" might be a marketing angle for parents buying for kids!

I think they're not incompatible enough for that to stick. Kids are very creative at finding ways to fool around and they'll discover which games run well enough pretty quickly.

 

[ryanshultz]

The number of people in these comments that are afraid of change is remarkable.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

"Plays zero games" might be a marketing angle for parents buying for kids!

Nah, that's "GeForce Now and XBOX PC Game Pass for $25 a month!"

 

[Mama Changa]

I predict that Qualcomm products will be abandoned by Microsoft in about 3 years.

If it were Google, I'd say 1 year just after making long-term commitments to support ARM publicly.

 

[upsetkiller]

Ridiculous.

Saying x86 is better than arm is like saying CRT is better than LCD.

The only reason why x86 is more convenient in some cases is because it’s old and well established. Otherwise ARM tech is better on every aspect (tech quality, license, evolution…)

Haven't seen a joke like this in decades lmao, arm quickly looses its efficency past a certain point , there's a reason apple only touts useless geek bench scores every launch lmao. If arm was so much better we'd see desktop class products with it, thr mac studio

Ridiculous.

Saying x86 is better than arm is like saying CRT is better than LCD.

The only reason why x86 is more convenient in some cases is because it’s old and well established. Otherwise ARM tech is better on every aspect (tech quality, license, evolution…)

Nice joke lmao

If arm was so efficient we would see it in proper desktop class products , the mac studio was so bad price to performance apple didn't even bother with it later on.

X86 is vastly more versatile and will continue to rule like it always has