Microsoft finally put a price on its Nvidia-powered laptop
Microsoft opened preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra on October 7, starting at $2,599, with shipments beginning October 16. The 15-inch machine is the first laptop built around Nvidia’s RTX Spark superchip, and it headlined a San Francisco event where CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pitched what Reuters called a hybrid-intelligence future: AI that runs on your machine instead of in Microsoft’s cloud.
The hardware is genuinely impressive on paper: up to a 20-core Arm-based Grace CPU, a Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 cores, as much as 128GB of unified memory, and enough AI compute to run 120-billion-parameter models locally, as Barron’s reported. Microsoft also unveiled a $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for developers and new Windows security tech — Microsoft Execution Containers — built to stop AI agents from touching data they shouldn’t, which Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia have all agreed to support, according to CNA. Microsoft also claimed that DeepSeek’s V4 model can run locally on machines with 60GB-plus of memory and beats OpenAI’s GPT-5 on some coding and reasoning tasks, CNA reports.
The fine print: $2,599 doesn’t buy the headline machine
Here is what the launch headlines mostly skipped. The $2,599 configuration runs the cut-down version of Nvidia’s RTX Spark N1X: an 18-core CPU, a 5,120-core Blackwell GPU, 24GB of unified memory, and a 512GB SSD, according to VideoCardz. The machine with the full 20-core chip, 6,144-core GPU, and 128GB of memory tops out at $5,899 — and stepping from 64GB to 128GB alone costs about $1,600, as Gagadget noted.
The footnotes matter, too. Microsoft’s own fine print says the “1 petaflop” figure is theoretical FP4 performance measured with sparsity — not a guarantee across workloads, as Unite.AI pointed out. The headline 2,000-nit display is peak HDR brightness measured over a 10% window; standard brightness runs lower. And even “128GB” needs translating: during Microsoft’s own demo, Windows Task Manager showed about 110GB as GPU-addressable on a 128GB machine, Notebookcheck reports.
For context, HP’s rival RTX Spark laptop, the OmniBook X 14, starts at $2,999 — so Microsoft undercuts HP at the entry level even as its true flagship config climbs past $5,800, per Wccftech.
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