Relevant quote regarding Snapdragon X
“As this was the first full quarter of shipments for Snapdragon X Series PCs, we saw sequential growth of around 180% compared to Q2 2024. However, as a proportion of the total Windows market, the products remain very niche, at less than 1.5% share. The top shipping vendor was Microsoft, which has transitioned most of their Surface line to the platform. Behind them was Dell who has embraced the new platform quite strongly in terms of SKU count, followed by HP, Lenovo, Acer and Asus (all four with similar volumes).”
This is such a bizarre story. First as others pointed out 1 in 125 is 0.8% not 0.008%. They presumably forgot the 100 but in percent conversions. It’s presumably 0.8% as if it’s 0.008% then they’re saying 9billion devices were sold on the last quarter. At 0.8% it’s 90million laptop devices. They later say 20% of all laptop sales were AI laptops at 13.3 million which would be 66.5 million laptops overall, not 90milljon. 720,000 would actually 1.1% of all laptops and 5.4% of the AI subcategory.
So whoever wrote the article doesn’t seem to know how to do basic maths? They also don’t make clear how they arrived at their figures with these contradictory figures elsewhere in their own article.
But the main thing is this whole story is some bizarre idea that a new device getting nearly 1% of global sales in its first quarter is doing badly?
To me that’s actually good? But maybe the manufacturer had some crazy expectations? Or maybe the writers think that all products should behave like incumbents?
This reads like shitty journalism - trying to make big claims to get clicks. I have no idea if the product is doing well or not versus expectations, but I don’t trust this articles take on it.
I’m personally skeptical about the “AI” bullshit in these products, but I do think the power efficiency of ARM chips may give these Snapdragon X a chance to take market share from traditional chips.
There was a lot of hype for this and some sketchy work by Qualcomm around benchmarks (initially posted benchmarks that were based on a linux setup with 100% custom cooling, none of the released products came close to this result and it’s not really viable to run Linux on Snapdragon X devices even to this day).
Really? That’s too bad, because I’ve been interested in a new laptop and those laptops looked interesting. I’m not actively shopping though, so hopefully Linux compat improves by the time my laptop dies.