Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch Windows laptop built around NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip, is now open for pre-order from $2,599, with availability beginning October 16. A companion machine, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, costs $5,999 and ships in November.
The hardware is aimed squarely at local AI work. Microsoft lists up to 128 GB of unified memory shared by an NVIDIA Grace CPU with up to 20 cores and a Blackwell GPU with up to 6,144 cores, and says the system can run models above 120B parameters at up to 1 petaflop of AI performance. The footnotes narrow that headline: the petaflop is a theoretical FP4 figure that relies on sparsity, and Microsoft concedes the GPU can address less than the full 128 GB.
Microsoft says the chassis stays under 18 mm and 4.5 lb while a redesigned thermal system provides up to 2.5 times the thermal power capacity of current Surface Laptops. The display is the other claim to weigh. Microsoft rates the PixelSense Ultra touchscreen at 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness, measured over a 10 percent window, and calls it up to 25 percent brighter than the MacBook Pro M5 Pro's published spec. Sustained and standard-range brightness are lower, which is how peak figures usually work.
Connectivity is where Surface Laptop Ultra differs most from its siblings. Magnetic Connect, which Microsoft describes as the first built-in magnetic USB-C charging on a laptop, snaps the charging cable onto the right-side port while leaving that port usable for data and video. Two more USB-C ports, HDMI, USB-A, an SD card reader and a headphone jack complete the set, and the storage is user-removable. One omission stands out for a machine marketed to creators who annotate designs on screen: the fine print says pen input is not supported.
The Dev Box carries the same RTX Spark platform in a small desktop form. It is sold only through Microsoft.com in the U.S. and arrives preloaded with Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub Copilot, WSL, Python and Node. Microsoft frames both devices as places to run agents locally, with its Execution Containers handling containment.
Buyers coming from Apple hardware get a financial nudge: Surface Laptop Ultra purchases made through November 23 qualify for up to $1,000 cash back on an eligible MacBook Pro trade-in, limited to the Microsoft Store online in the U.S. and Canada.
