GoKawiilQualcomm's Snapdragon C is making a major play for the hottest laptop market in 2026: The ultra budget segment. But competition is stiff, with Apple's MacBook Neo and Intel Wildcat Lake Windows laptops offering strong performance and battery life in affordable packages - even with sky-high global memory prices.
We sat down with Qualcomm's SVP of compute and gaming, Kedar Kondap, and other Qualcomm representatives at Computex 2026 to hear how Snapdragon C fits into its existing product lineup, and how Qualcomm considers itself uniquely positioned to offer a comprehensive ecosystem of agentic AI devices and software.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Latest Videos From Watch full video here:
Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm SVP of Compute and Gaming: Our journey was not about solving what has happened in the past 30 years of PC innovation, but solving what's coming next in PCs. A lot of the innovation that has happened, we've obviously proved to the market that we're exceeding performance. We focused on three big metrics all along the way. One was leading with performance and making sure that we have leading performance in all of our silicon. We want to make sure we lead with power. Obviously, that used to be something super critical across the board, even as we start looking at newer generation of devices, and third, as you look at AI as a key metric.
When you think about the keynote today, and what we talked, what I shall talk about, as we enter this agentic world, it is more and more important. Each of these things play a very important role, whether it's performance, whether it's power, or whether it's AI, and the ability to run these intelligently. Right from whether it is a very small device, all the way to the data center. You saw how we're innovating, and the PC is no different. So we launched our X series processors, we extended that to the X Elite, the X Plus, and the X family. We launched the X2 Plus, we launched the X2 Elite, and the X2 Elite Extreme, and we wanted to make sure our intent was very simple: we wanted to make sure that the experiences we offer are available to all the consumers at every price point that we could address. What we introduced yesterday is a new class of platforms, the Snapdragon C. Our intent with that is to address platforms in lower price points that we can go and make sure that we can deliver the same performance pillar, the same battery life pillar, as well as provide AI functionality to all the consumers at price points that were never heard of.
So with that, we wanted to make sure that we have a full stack of products, we are addressing the needs of what consumers want. Consumers want the best performance, the best battery life, and as we enter this world of agentic beta, we want to make sure that across different devices, we're addressing all of these price points. So, we’re excited to be here, and I know there's a little bit of a longer introduction, but I want to make sure you have the perspective of where we come from.
Journalist 1: Thanks, Kadar. Nicole. You were just on stage with Advantech. Can you get us a little background on your announcements and what was said on stage?
Qualcomm Representative: Advantech has been a great partner of ours. I've done more recently the industrial business for Qualcomm, and so, you know, for us to get into this new area, and industrial is actually changing very rapidly. We are starting to see AI enter into the operation, advantage has been here in this space for a number of years, and so we announced a variety of different products to them over the last couple of years. Great to actually be at their keynote. We also announced yesterday [unintelligible] robotics reference design, which is something that is a new area for us. We've been partnered with Advantech for a number of years in this space, but the robotic session design will be a humanoid focus session.
Journalist 2: I'm wondering, Nvidia, a few hours ago, announced they were entering PC market. You guys have had it yourselves for the last two years. How are you thinking about how others come into [unintelligible].
... continue reading