Microsoft’s latest Surface hardware is built for the AI era, pairing the new RTX Spark platform, massive unified memory and Microsoft’s design sensibility across both laptop and desktop form factors.
Microsoft took the stage today at an event in San Francisco to open pre-orders for what it calls its most powerful Surface devices ever: the Surface Laptop Ultra and Surface RTX Spark Dev Box. Both machines are built from the ground up around NVIDIA’s RTX Spark superchip.
Both devices share the same silicon foundation, pairing an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores and a Grace CPU with up to 20 cores, backed by up to 128 GB of unified memory. Microsoft says the platform delivers up to one petaflop of AI performance and can run AI models exceeding 120 billion parameters locally, with no cloud required.
On stage, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang framed the hardware as a shift in what a personal computer can be. “The personal computer is the ultimate tool, it’s my ultimate tool, and for a whole generation of people, it’s our ultimate tool,” Huang said. “What happens in the era of agents, when the agent is on your computer? It is now your personal assistant.”
The Surface Laptop Ultra wraps that power in a chassis less than 18 mm thick and weighing under 4.5 lb, topped with a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra touchscreen that Microsoft says reaches 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness, up to 25% brighter than the MacBook Pro M5. A new thermal architecture allows for up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of current Surface Laptops, while storage is user-removable. The laptop also debuts Magnetic Connect, the first built-in magnetic USB-C charging system on a laptop. When the workday ends, ray tracing, DLSS and NVIDIA Reflex support carry over to gaming on Windows on Arm.
The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, meanwhile, is a compact desktop aimed squarely at developers and AI engineers. It ships preloaded with tools such as Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub Copilot, WSL, Python and Node as part of Microsoft’s Project Zenith family. It is exclusive to Microsoft’s U.S. store for now, priced at $5,999 US and shipping in November.
The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599 US, or $3,899.99 in Canada, with pre-orders live ahead of an Oct. 16 release. To sweeten the switch, Microsoft is offering up to $1,000 cash back to buyers who trade in an eligible MacBook Pro, with the promotion running through Nov. 23 in both the United States and Canada.
