Qualcomm's Snapdragon C is trying to compete where it has no business being

At Computex, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon C, a new chipset that it said is aimed at laptops that will cost $300 and up. Aside from announcing the chipset, it really won't say anything else, as much as even acknowledging the most trivial of specs.

It's not good, and after a string of underwhelming mid-tier launches between the first Windows on Arm PCs in 2017, and 2023, it has a lot to prove. This chip doesn't actually seem to be aimed at $300 laptops, and it seems primed to underwhelm again.

The Snapdragon C is not for $300 laptops

Maybe in another timeline

I attended a Q&A session hosted by Qualcomm's SVP of Compute and Gaming Kedar Kondap, and one thing that I took away from it is that despite the messaging around it, the Snapdragon C isn't actually a chip for $300 laptops. It's a chip for laptops that cost $300 in a fictional timeline where there's no memory shortage.

This, of course, puts Qualcomm in an impossible situation with the Snapdragon C. If it goes into $600 laptops, the conversation becomes about how it competes with the likes of the MacBook Neo and Dell's new XPS 13. So when I asked about how it stacks up against what will actually be its competitors, I couldn't get a real answer.

Even aside from all of that, this has always been an issue for Qualcomm. When Snapdragon X launched back in 2024, it was supposed to show up in laptops that cost as little as $600. Then, laptops like the Asus Zenbook A14 started hitting the market for over $1,000. Lower-priced devices did appear eventually, but it never seemed to be the budget chip it was intended to be.

At a certain point, you have to wonder if it's just really ambitious math.

I do think that the messaging is a bit different though. When Snapdragon X Plus 8-core launched, Qualcomm CEO let it slip that the company would be in laptops that cost as little as $600, even though the target price for that chip was $800 and Snapdragon X was going to launch later. There's a big shift in tone when you go from, "Our chip will be in laptops that cost X dollars" to "We're targeting laptops that cost X dollars". One implies that it's something that's already known but yet to hit the other, while the other is just a hope.

The specs aren't there

It's a QCS6490

We know what the specs of the Snapdragon C are, even if Qualcomm isn't saying it. It's a QCS6490 under the hood, a chip that's existed for a good five years, living on as a mobile chip, a Dragonwing, and more. It's a long-term servicing chipset, so the company has tons of them.

But it's still a five-year-old chipset that was made for phones, phones that weren't even in the premium tier at the time. It has four Cortex-A78 cores, with one of those as the prime core, and four Cortex-A55 cores.

That's really not good. As it stands right now, you can get a Surface Pro 9 5G, which includes a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (branded as Microsoft SQ3), for around $500, and that's going to get you much better performance.

There's no mystery here, and that's probably why Qualcomm isn't talking about it. If these products start launching at price points between $500 and $600, they simply won't stand up to competitors.

The vibes are off

Hey, I've seen this movie

I can't tell you how many times I've covered a new Snapdragon Compute announcement, and written about the hype. We were always told that 8 meant premium, so the original Snapdragon 835 was supposed to be great, the Snapdragon 850 was supposed to fix it, and the Snapdragon 8cx was supposed to finally bring it on par with an Intel Core i5.

When the Snapdragon 7c launched, Qualcomm was set to change the landscape of mid-tier PCs, adding value where no one else could.

I reviewed products and talked about how Microsoft Edge and Office ran well enough, but we needed better emulation. When Adobe introduced a native version of Photoshop, I dealt with how it was so buggy that it would crash if you tried to open more than one file at a time. It was broken like this for years, and Qualcomm still championed it as a native app available on its platforms.

I did it all with optimism for the future ahead, and Qualcomm finally delivered when it launched Snapdragon X Elite. We got the performance, and we got the native apps.

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I still look at Snapdragon launches with an eye of skepticism though, and that's why I'm writing this. I've seen these products get hyped, and I've seen the aftermath.

The only difference this time is, there's no real hype. Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon C with a slide that essentially said, "This is a product". There's no promise of revolutionizing $300 PCs, and like I said above, it's not even truly aimed at $300 PCs.

The math isn't mathing

The biggest tell here is that the Snapdragon C isn't actually meant to go into $300 laptops, unless the memory shortage was to suddenly end, something that there are no signs of. But in 2026, this isn't a $300 laptop part. It's also just not a good part, given the specs that we know.

Qualcomm's silence is deafening. It's not talking about any specs at all (even simple things like confirming that it doesn't have a Copilot+ NPU), it won't answer questions about how the Snapdragon C competes against its real competitors, and it's not promising to disrupt the market that it's targeting.