Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra: A Powerful MacBook Pro Competitor

Microsoft hasn't had great look with its beefier Surface notebooks. The original Surface Book looked very cool, but it was bulky and cursed with old hardware. The Surface Laptop Studio took two generations to live up to its potential, and by then it was also terribly expensive. Now Microsoft is making another grab for power users with the Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch beast of a machine using NVIDIA's RTX Spark system-on-a-chip for powerful graphics and AI performance. It's a straightforward MacBook Pro competitor, with no weird hinges or removable screens like the previous high-end Surface notebooks. "This is the most powerful thing we've ever made," Andrew Hill, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Surface, said in a briefing with reporters. NVIDIA's RTX Spark is its big attempt at competing with AMD and Qualcomm's latest chips, and it's notable for including 6,144 Blackwell GPU cores and 20 Arm CPU cores. NVIDIA claims its offers 1 petaflop worth of AI performance (including its GPUs, CPU and NPU), and says its graphics performance is similar to the RTX 5070 laptop GPU (but with a power draw between single-digits and 80W). At first glance, though, the Surfaced Laptop Ultra just looks like a typical workhorse machine. You'll have to look closer to see what makes it truly special: A new 15-inch MiniLED Ultra screen with up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness; the largest trackpad Microsoft has ever built; and all of the ports you'd want, including USB A and C, HDMI and a full-sized card reader. Much like the MacBook Pro, the Surface Laptop Ultra also clocks in under 4.5 pounds. And to prove it means serious business, also like the MacBook Pro, it's available in black and dark silver. There are very few surprises here, but that's not stopping Microsoft CVP Brett Ostrum from waxing hyperbolically about the Surface Laptop Ultra's greatness. In an announcement post, he wrote: "A machine like this should not sit still. It should be pushed. Taken to the edge. Used to make real what others call impossible. It belongs in the hands of world makers." It's just a laptop, man. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait a bit for the Surface Laptop Ultra. Microsoft says it'll arrive this fall, and of course, it also isn't saying a word about pricing yet. I'm just hoping we'll see a bit of relief from the RAMaggedon price pressure by the fall.