Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra Takes Aim at MacBook Pro With $2,599 Price, Nvidia RTX Spark Chip and 128GB RAM

SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft on Wednesday set a $2,599 starting price for the Surface Laptop Ultra, its most powerful laptop to date, and opened pre-orders for the machine, positioning it as a direct challenger to Apple's MacBook Pro in the high-end market for creative professionals and software developers.

The 15-inch laptop undercuts Apple's 16-inch MacBook Pro, which starts at $2,999, by $400. Microsoft said the device is designed for "demanding creative, software development, AI, engineering, and 3D workloads," a pitch aimed squarely at the users who have made Apple's Pro line the default choice in many studios and engineering teams.

The pricing announcement followed a Windows and Surface event in San Francisco, Microsoft's first major Windows-focused showcase in more than two years. The company's last such event came in May 2024, when it unveiled Copilot+ PCs and laid out a strategy built around AI-ready hardware. Microsoft billed this week's event as focused on "how local AI will shape the next chapter of the PC."

Built around Nvidia's first PC superchip

At the heart of the Surface Laptop Ultra is Nvidia's RTX Spark, an Arm-based system-on-a-chip that combines an Nvidia Blackwell RTX graphics processor with up to 6,144 cores and an Nvidia Grace CPU with up to 20 cores. The laptop supports up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory, which is shared between the processor and graphics chip, and uses a new thermal design to handle the hardware's heat output.

Microsoft has said the laptop delivers GPU performance on par with Nvidia's RTX 5070 graphics card. The company also says the Laptop Ultra can run AI models with up to 120 billion parameters locally, a capability meant to appeal to developers who want to build and test AI tools without relying on cloud servers. The machine includes full support for Nvidia's CUDA software platform, the programming framework widely used in AI and scientific computing.

Because the RTX Spark is built on Arm architecture, the Surface Laptop Ultra runs Windows on Arm. Apps written for traditional x86 processors from Intel and AMD run through Prism, Microsoft's emulation layer.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang formally introduced the RTX Spark processor during his keynote at the Computex trade show in Taipei in June, and Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra as the first device to use the chip. At the IFA trade show in Berlin, Nvidia and its partners said new PCs powered by the RTX Spark chip would arrive in October 2026.

Display, design and ports

The laptop features a 15-inch Mini LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, 262 pixels per inch and peak HDR brightness of 2,000 nits. The panel has a resolution of 2,880 by 1,920.

The machine measures less than 18 millimeters thick and weighs under 4.5 pounds, and it comes in Platinum and Nightfall finishes.

Microsoft has leaned into practical features that set the device apart from Apple's minimalist port selection. The Surface Laptop Ultra includes USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, a headphone jack and a full-size SD card reader, which Microsoft says eliminates the need for an external dock. Its haptic touchpad is 30% larger than before, and the company says the new cooling system has 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop 7.

The laptop also has a user-replaceable solid-state drive and built-in repair guidance for servicing with official parts. Microsoft promises all-day battery life and says the laptop maintains its performance when running on battery power.

Pricing lands below expectations

The $2,599 starting price came in below several earlier predictions. A forum user who said he tested a prototype unit had predicted the laptop would start no lower than $2,800, with the top-end configuration landing around $4,500. Earlier rumors had suggested variants with the top RTX Spark chip could cost at least $2,899 in the U.S.

In September, German leaker Roland Quandt said retail information pointed to a configuration with a lower-end RTX Spark chip, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD landing around 2,000 euros.

The price gap with Apple narrows depending on configuration. The entry-level 16-inch MacBook Pro comes with an M5 Pro chip, 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Buyers will need to compare memory, storage and chip tiers carefully, as Microsoft's top configurations with 128GB of memory are expected to cost significantly more than the base model.

Performance comparisons with Apple remain an open question. Unofficial benchmarks run on a prototype in Phoronix Test Suite, Blender and Cinebench suggested RTX Spark trailed Apple's M5 Pro chip, though those tests were conducted on pre-release hardware and early drivers. Independent reviews of retail units are expected after the laptop reaches customers.

Availability

Pre-orders opened Wednesday. Reports ahead of the event indicated initial shipments would begin in mid-October. Microsoft had previously listed the laptop as a pre-release product, noting that final availability depended on regulatory approval.

The launch also extends beyond Microsoft's own hardware. In June, Nvidia said laptops from Asus, MSI, Dell, HP, Lenovo and others would also use the Spark chip, setting up a broader push by the Windows ecosystem into a segment long dominated by Apple's in-house silicon.

A shift in Microsoft's Arm strategy

The Surface Laptop Ultra marks a notable change in Microsoft's approach to Arm-based Windows computers. In 2024, the company introduced Arm-based Copilot+ PCs and deepened its work with Qualcomm; this time, the spotlight is on a Surface system built around Nvidia technology.

The move reflects mounting pressure on Windows PC makers to answer Apple, whose Mac lineup has gained ground among creative professionals since the company switched to its own chips. By pairing Nvidia's graphics expertise with a large pool of unified memory — a design approach Apple popularized — Microsoft is betting it can win over developers and AI researchers who need heavy GPU power in a portable machine.

Game developers have also begun lining up behind the platform. Sega has confirmed that its 2027 title Virtua Fighter Crossroads will natively support RTX Spark.

Microsoft will continue its push into AI-focused computing next month. The company's Ignite conference is scheduled for Nov. 17-20 in San Francisco.

Note: I couldn't load Microsoft's announcement post directly, so the article relies on your supplied text plus earlier reporting. The only direct quotes used are the Microsoft phrases from your source and the event invitation; double-check the exact ship date on Microsoft's store before publishing, since only pre-event reports put it at mid-October.