Microsoft will release the Surface Laptop Ultra on October 16th, the company's most powerful Surface device to date. The starting price is $2,599, and preorders opened today. It arrives alongside other laptops built on Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip, which both Microsoft and Nvidia are aiming at the premium end of the laptop market.
The Surface Laptop Ultra features a 15-inch HDR touchscreen with peak brightness of up to 2,000 nits. It includes a larger trackpad that supports haptic feedback and a magnetic USB-C charging solution. The chassis is made of aluminum and draws comparisons to the MacBook Pro, the device Microsoft intends it to compete with.
The RTX Spark chip is an Arm-based processor with up to 128GB of unified memory. Microsoft and Nvidia say RTX Spark laptops are designed for high performance across creative software, gaming, and local AI tasks. The Surface Laptop Ultra is being positioned in that same premium tier.
Port selection on the device includes three USB-C ports, an HDMI port, a single USB-A port, a full-size SD card reader, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Surface Laptop Ultra will be sold in a range of configurations. The most expensive model is priced at $5,899.99 and comes with 128GB of RAM, a 20-core CPU, and 1TB of storage.
The launch places Microsoft in direct competition with Apple's MacBook Pro lineup at the high end of the US laptop market, where buyers weighing creative and AI workloads have typically gravitated toward Apple hardware. Nvidia's entry into Arm-based laptop processors also expands its reach beyond the discrete graphics cards it has long supplied for gaming and professional systems.
Microsoft has separately announced that it is giving Copilot more control over Windows and your files. The first Nvidia RTX Spark laptops cost up to $7,000, according to reporting from Antonio G. Di Benedetto. Microsoft also detailed how it built its MacBook Pro competitor.
The Surface Laptop Ultra is the centerpiece of Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra event, where the company laid out its hardware plans for the coming cycle. Preorders are live as of today, with units shipping October 16th.
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