Microsoft launches Surface Laptop Ultra with Nvidia RTX Spark chip at $2,599

Microsoft wrapped a Windows and Surface event in San Francisco late yesterday, and the headline is straightforward: the Surface Laptop Ultra hits shelves on October 16 as the launch platform for RTX Spark, the Arm-based chip that puts Nvidia into the PC processor market for the first time. Until now Nvidia has sold discrete graphics cards; now it is selling the whole package — CPU, GPU and NPU in a single die — and Microsoft is giving it the most prominent slot in its catalog.

The base configuration costs $2,599 and includes an 18-core processor, 24 GB of unified memory and 512 GB of storage. The display is a 15-inch HDR panel rated at 2,000 nits peak brightness. The trackpad is larger and adds haptics, and for the first time on a Surface the magnetic dock connector moves to standard USB-C instead of the proprietary Surface Connect port. The chip itself supports up to 128 GB of unified memory, and Microsoft and Nvidia are positioning the machine at the high end for creators, gamers and anyone running local AI workloads.

On the software side Microsoft introduced "Hybrid Intelligence," a model that blends local and cloud models to give Copilot access to files on the device and the ability to take actions in the operating system. Senior vice president Jacob Andreou demonstrated an agent called Autopilot on stage: it located tax documents scattered across folders, renamed the files, compressed them into a single directory and drafted an email to the accountant with the archive attached. A parallel search update lets users trigger quick actions directly from the search bar.

For developers there is the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a mini PC housed in a 3D-printed aluminum chassis that doubles as a heatsink. Pre-orders open at $5,999 with shipping in November. The price is substantially higher than the DGX Spark Nvidia launched last year, and the company attributes the gap to a memory-component shortage that has driven up hardware costs. Before launch the device underwent a durability gauntlet in a windowless Redmond lab where robots hammered keys thousands of times, massive antennas blasted radio waves and fixtures dropped objects from ever-greater heights.