Everything announced at Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra event

Before Microsoft releases a laptop to the public, it needs to put the device through its paces. That all happens inside a windowless, warehouse-like lab on the company’s Redmond, Washington, campus, where the team developing Surface devices programs robots to press their buttons thousands of times, pelts devices with radio waves from giant antennas, and builds contraptions that drop objects from increasingly daring heights to see whether the products can hold up.

Its latest laptop, the product I’m here to see, really needs to hold up. The Surface Laptop Ultra isn’t just another high-end config of the Surface Laptop, it’s the debut platform for Nvidia’s RTX Spark — Nvidia’s entrance into the world of Arm-based PC chips, and a chance to blow expectations out of the water when it comes to what a Windows laptop is capable of.

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At today’s Windows and Surface event, Microsoft showed off an upgrade to its Copilot AI system that will give it access to local files on your PC and the ability to take actions across the OS. It’s part of an idea Microsoft is calling “Hybrid Intelligence,” where apps and tools rely on a mix of local and cloud AI models to accomplish tasks efficiently.

To show off how Hybrid Intelligence works, Jacob Andreou, Microsoft’s EVP of Copilot, walked through a video demo on stage asking Microsoft’s Autopilot tool to help with filing taxes. Andreou told the AI agent that he got an email from his accountant and asked Autopilot to get her what she needs. Autopilot then used Hybrid Intelligence to search across different folders to find the documents, rename the files, zip them into a folder, and draft an email to send to the accountant with the zip file attached.

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Months after revealing its Surface Laptop Ultra, Microsoft has announced that the Nvidia RTX Spark-equipped device will launch on October 16th. Pricing starts at $2,599 for the base configuration, featuring an 18-core CPU, 24GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage.

The Surface Laptop Ultra ships with a 15-inch HDR touchscreen display with up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness, along with a larger trackpad that supports haptic feedback. The device uses Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip, an Arm-based processor with up to 128GB of unified memory. Both Microsoft and Nvidia are positioning RTX Spark laptops at the very premium end of the laptop market, designed for high performance across creative software, gaming, and local AI tasks.

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Microsoft’s Nvidia-powered Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is available for preorder now directly, and slated to ship in November for just about $6,000. It’s pricier than the DGX Spark mini PC Nvidia launched last year, but PC prices have been climbing due to shortages of RAM and other components.

The Dev Box’s flat, 3D-printed anodized aluminum chassis doubles as a heatsink and resembles the top vents on an Xbox Series X. It’s launching alongside the new Surface Laptop Ultra and runs on Nvidia’s Arm-based RTX Spark platform and 128GB of unified memory. With that much memory, along with a 100-watt thermal envelope and Nvidia’s Tensor cores, you could probably get an impressive gaming experience on the Dev Box. But as its name suggests, it’s mainly aimed at developers. It’s optimized for running local AI, including “models exceeding 120B parameters,” for tasks like testing AI models, prototyping AI agents, or running AI coding tools on-device.

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Microsoft has created a magnetic charging solution for its Surface Laptop Ultra that uses USB-C. After scrapping its proprietary Surface Connect magnetic charging on its smaller Surface devices last year, the Surface Laptop Ultra has a charging cable that attaches magnetically to the right-side USB-C port.

During Microsoft’s Windows event on Wednesday, Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri said that you can just “bring the connector close, and it snaps right into place.“ It’s still a proprietary solution, but the USB-C port it slots into still works for video, data, and other USB-C connectivity like you’d expect. Microsoft is calling it Magnetic Connect, and I’m surprised the company hasn’t shortened that to Mag-C.

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We’re in San Francisco today to hear what’s next for Windows and Surface. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri will all be holding a “conversation on how local AI will shape the next chapter of the PC.”

Microsoft and Nvidia have been working together on the new RTX Spark platform, which is focused on boosting local AI models, creative apps, and even gaming on a series of new laptops. Nvidia’s GPU expertise is getting squeezed into laptops like the Surface Laptop Ultra, and we’re about to find out exactly what it’s capable of.

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