Microsoft opened pre-orders on October 7 for the Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch laptop built on Nvidia’s RTX Spark superchip, at a starting price of $2,599, with sales beginning October 16. It also began taking U.S. pre-orders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a $5,999 compact PC aimed at developers who run artificial intelligence (AI) models on their own hardware.
The announcement came in a post on Microsoft’s Devices blog by Brett Ostrum, corporate vice president for Surface. The laptop itself is not new: a June 2 post by Andrew Hill, corporate vice president for Surface Product, said it had been introduced earlier that week as a high-performance machine for developers, creators and technical professionals. October’s post adds the price, the pre-order window and the on-sale date.
What is inside
The RTX Spark chip combines an Nvidia Grace processor with up to 20 cores and an Nvidia Blackwell RTX graphics processor with up to 6,144 cores, according to Microsoft. Memory is unified, meaning the processor and graphics share one pool, and ranges from 24 GB to 128 GB depending on configuration. The product page notes that the graphics processor can address less than the total. Storage runs from 512 GB to 2 TB on a solid-state drive that Microsoft says the user can remove.
Microsoft rates the chip at up to 1 petaflop of AI performance and says the laptop can run AI models with more than 120 billion parameters locally. A footnote explains that the petaflop figure is a theoretical rating at FP4, a low-precision number format, using a feature called sparsity.
The 15-inch PixelSense Ultra touchscreen refreshes at 120 Hz, covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color range and supports Dolby Vision IQ. Microsoft lists a peak HDR brightness of 2,000 nits, measured over 10% of the screen, and claims it is up to 25% brighter in peak HDR than Apple’s MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro chip. The product page does not state the screen’s resolution.
The company says the cooling system has up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop (8th Edition). The chassis is under 18 mm thick and weighs under 4.5 lb. The touchpad is 30% larger than the one on the Surface Laptop 8th Edition, according to the blog post. Colors are Platinum and Nightfall, the latter on selected models only.
Ports include three USB-C ports with USB4, one USB-A port, HDMI, an SD card reader and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. One of the USB-C ports, on the right side, accepts a magnetic charging connector while still carrying data and video. Microsoft says the laptop can drive up to three external 4K displays with compatible accessories. A 140W USB-C power adapter is included, though in some markets only with certain configurations.
Microsoft rates battery life at up to 15 hours of local video playback and up to 12 hours of web browsing, based on September 2026 tests of preproduction hardware with the screen set to 150 nits. The 24 GB model ships with Windows 11 Home, and the larger memory configurations with Windows 11 Pro. A commercial version, Surface Laptop Ultra for Business, is also offered.
The Dev Box
The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box uses the same chip with 128 GB of unified memory. It ships with Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub CLI, GitHub Copilot, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Python and Node, and Microsoft places it in a device family called Project Zenith. It is sold only through Microsoft.com in the U.S. and begins shipping in November.
Why it matters
The pitch for both machines is local AI work: running and testing large models on a desk or a lap rather than renting cloud graphics processors. The June post said the Dev Box can run models of more than 120 billion parameters with a one-million-token context at interactive speeds, and fine-tune models that previously required cloud instances.
Microsoft is also marketing the laptop directly against Apple. Alongside the MacBook Pro brightness comparison, it is offering up to $1,000 cash back to buyers who trade in an eligible MacBook Pro, for purchases from October 7 to November 23, 2026, through the Microsoft Store online in the U.S. and Canada.
The caveats
The performance, brightness and battery figures are Microsoft’s and Nvidia’s own, and several rest on preproduction hardware or theoretical peaks. A petaflop at FP4 with sparsity describes a best case for certain AI arithmetic, not everyday application speed. The $2,599 figure is a starting price; Microsoft’s U.S. store lists the laptop at $2,599.99, and higher memory and storage configurations cost more.
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