Microsoft put a $2,599 starting price on the Surface Laptop Ultra at its Oct. 7 Windows and Surface event in San Francisco, opened pre-orders the same day and set general availability for Oct. 16.
The machine is a 15-inch clamshell aimed at creators, developers and people running AI models locally, and it arrives with a trade-in offer that runs through late November. Microsoft first showed the laptop in June without a price, and the Oct. 7 event was where the dollar figure, the pre-order button and the on-sale date finally landed on the same page for U.S. buyers.
RTX Spark Inside a 15-Inch Chassis
The processor is NVIDIA’s RTX Spark superchip, which pairs an Arm-based Grace CPU with up to 20 cores and a Blackwell RTX graphics engine with up to 6,144 cores. According to NVIDIA’s post on the event, the platform tops out at 128GB of unified memory and one petaflop of FP4 AI performance, and it runs the full CUDA software stack.
Microsoft’s product page fills in the rest. The display is a 15-inch, 120 Hz touchscreen with 100 percent DCI-P3 color and a peak HDR brightness of 2,000 nits, the case weighs under 4.5 pounds and measures under 18 millimeters thick, and storage goes up to 2TB. Microsoft claims up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop (8th Edition), and a 140-watt power supply ships in select markets.
Ports include three USB-C, one USB-A, full-size HDMI, an SD card reader and a headphone jack, plus magnetic USB-C charging. Colors are Platinum and a new Nightfall finish, offered on selected models only. Engadget adds that graphics performance is comparable to the GeForce RTX 5070, that the NPU meets Copilot+ requirements, that power draw tops out at 80 watts and that the trackpad is about 30 percent larger than the one on the seventh-generation Surface Laptop. NVIDIA lists DLSS 5, Reflex and G-SYNC support for gaming, with AAA titles running at 1440p above 100 frames per second, and hardware AV1 plus 4:2:2 video encode and decode for creators.
The $2,599 Starting Line
Engadget’s event roundup gives the key figures: starts at $2,599, pre-orders open on Oct. 7, on sale Oct. 16. Microsoft’s store page lists the laptop at $2,599.99 and shows a pre-order button, but it does not say which memory and storage tier that price buys, and Engadget does not either. With memory topping out at 128GB and storage at 2TB, the fully loaded versions will sit above the entry figure, though no published source gives prices for those versions.
The Oct. 16 date comes from NVIDIA and Engadget rather than from Microsoft’s own product page, which carries no ship date. NVIDIA’s post says RTX Spark laptops become available on Oct. 16 and that compact desktops built on the same chip go on sale in November, with systems from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Gigabyte in the same lineup. A trade-in promotion on the Microsoft Store runs from Oct. 7 to Nov. 23, online in the United States and Canada.
Davuluri and Nadella on Agents
Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s executive vice president for Windows and Devices, framed the laptop as a showcase for the NVIDIA partnership. He said at the event that Microsoft built the laptop around RTX Spark, according to NVIDIA. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, tied the platform to AI agents, saying the company had to make the desktop the most secure place for agents to run code, and NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang offered a line about the two companies’ shared history: “If not for Windows there would be no GeForce.” The chip is the part Microsoft is selling hardest, and Engadget puts its graphics performance on a par with the GeForce RTX 5070, a level more often priced into gaming and workstation laptops than into thin-and-light notebooks.
Brett Ostrum, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Surface, described the engineering approach when the machine was first shown in June. He said the laptop was designed from the inside out, as Thurrott reported at the time, when Microsoft was still withholding pricing.
Microsoft’s own Source EMEA write-up of the Oct. 7 announcement, which credits Davuluri with the original Windows blog post, says the laptop is available for pre-order and frames the launch as spanning Windows, Copilot and Surface. Repairability gets a mention on the product page too, which promises published repair guides, replacement parts and upgradeable storage, and Engadget notes the SSD is replaceable.
The one detail Microsoft has not put on its product page is the ship date itself, which currently lives in NVIDIA’s event post and in Engadget’s roundup, and buyers comparing the $2,599 figure against rival workstation laptops will have to wait for the configuration-level price list to see what the entry tier actually includes.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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