During Qualcomm’s earnings webcast for the first quarter of 2025 (timestamp 22:49 if you’re interested), President and CEO Cristiano Amon shared a very specific data point: “Within the sale of U.S. retail of Windows laptops above $800, [Qualcomm] had more than 10% share.” In other words, out of all the Windows laptops priced above $800 and sold in the U.S. between October and December 2024, more than 10% were powered by Snapdragon X chips.
The first thing you might notice here is that 10% is a much bigger number than the 0.8% market share Qualcomm was reported to have during the third quarter of 2024. The second thing you might notice, however, is just how many qualifiers this statement has. This data point isn’t covering all PCs, all laptops, or even all Windows laptops — it’s only covering Windows laptops over $800. It’s also only talking about the U.S., and only taking into account consumer sales.
All in all, it’s very specific — and on the bright side, this makes it more likely to be true since without all those qualifiers, the 10% figure would seem utterly unbelievable. On the not-so-bright side, it also makes the statement a lot less impressive.
It’s fair to cut Qualcomm some slack, though — it’s pretty new to the PC market, and its Snapdragon X chip got a lot of people talking. It helped Windows-on-Arm really start to take off, and gave Windows laptops a significant battery life boost compared to x86 devices. The company’s goal to take 50% of the Windows PC market by 2029 might look a long way off right now, but a lot can happen in four years.
