Microsoft and Nvidia opened preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch flagship built on Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip, starting at $2,599 and shipping October 16. The companies revealed pricing Wednesday at Microsoft’s first major Windows and Surface event in more than two years, held in San Francisco, alongside a Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for developers starting at $5,999, according to Tom’s Hardware. Machines on the same platform from Asus, Dell, Lenovo, HP and MSI ship the same day.
The pitch is local AI, meaning big models running on the laptop instead of in the cloud. The top configuration carries 128GB of unified memory and runs close to $5,900, and Microsoft paired the hardware with Windows 11 changes aimed at AI agents and a breakaway magnetic USB-C charging port, according to XDA Developers, which tied the steep entry price partly to the ongoing memory shortage. It’s Windows’ most direct answer yet to Apple’s high-end Macs, and it isn’t cheap.