Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra at a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday, setting an October 16 release date and a starting price of $2,599 for the new machine. As reported by Ars Technica, the laptop serves as the debut platform for Nvidia's Arm-based RTX Spark processor.
The base hardware configuration includes 24GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Hardware configurations scale up to 128GB of unified memory, paired with a 15-inch HDR touchscreen display that reaches 2,000 nits of peak brightness and a haptic trackpad. For power delivery, Microsoft replaced its older Surface Connect port with a magnetic system called Magnetic Connect, which snaps onto a USB-C port that still handles standard data and video connections.
Surface Dev Box and Windows AI
Alongside the flagship notebook, Microsoft opened preorders for the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at $5,999, with shipments scheduled to begin in November. The developer mini PC uses a 3D-printed anodized aluminum chassis that doubles as a heatsink, running the RTX Spark platform inside a 100-watt thermal envelope with 128GB of unified memory. Microsoft specified that the hardware is built to run local artificial intelligence models exceeding 120 billion parameters.
Software demonstrations focused on upcoming Windows features under a framework Microsoft calls Hybrid Intelligence. Jacob Andreou, executive vice president of Copilot, showed an AI agent called Autopilot locating tax documents across local folders, renaming the files, compressing them into an archive, and preparing an email draft with the attachment. Windows is also adding quick actions directly inside the primary search bar.
Meta will also bring its Muse AI agent to Windows as a native application, Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri announced. Meta launched a Mac version of Muse in September, but the company gave no timeline for when the Windows release will arrive.
