Microsoft opened preorders on October 7 for the Surface Laptop Ultra, its new flagship notebook built around Nvidia's RTX Spark chip, with a starting price of $2,599 and shipping set to begin October 16, according to Windows Central. It is the highest starting price Microsoft has set for a Surface laptop and marks the formal launch of hardware the company first showed at Computex in June.
The base configuration pairs an 18-core CPU with a 5,120-core GPU and 24GB of RAM for $2,599, a specification set The Verge's Zac Bowden compared directly to a similarly priced 14-inch MacBook Pro ($2,499) with an 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU and the same 24GB of memory — a far smaller GPU core count, though Apple's and Nvidia's architectures are not directly comparable core-for-core. Higher-end configurations scale up to 128GB of unified memory, which Microsoft says lets the laptop run AI models with more than 120 billion parameters entirely on the device, without a cloud connection.
The RTX Spark chip at the center of the machine is an Arm-based processor Nvidia unveiled earlier this year, combining 20 Arm CPU cores with 6,144 Blackwell-generation GPU cores. Nvidia rates it at roughly 1 petaflop of AI compute and graphics performance comparable to its RTX 5070 laptop GPU. The Surface Laptop Ultra itself has a 15-inch MiniLED display capable of 2,000 nits of peak brightness, weighs under 4.5 pounds, and comes in Platinum and Nightfall finishes with a trackpad Microsoft says is 30% larger than the previous generation's.
A Direct Challenge on Apple's Turf
Bloomberg's coverage of the launch was headlined bluntly: Microsoft says the new laptop outperforms MacBooks on its internal testing, a framing the company has leaned into as it tries to carve out a premium niche against Apple's dominance of high-end laptops. The Surface Laptop Ultra arrives alongside a companion device, the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box aimed at AI developers, which The Verge reports has also opened for preorder with shipments beginning in November.
Both machines extend Microsoft's broader push, alongside Nvidia, toward laptops that can run large AI models locally rather than relying on cloud data centers — a strategy the companies previewed earlier this week. Independent reviewers have not yet tested retail units, so Microsoft's performance comparisons remain unverified by outside benchmarks. Preorders are open now on Microsoft's Surface site ahead of the October 16 ship date.
