Microsoft hasn’t had a good look with its rugged Surface notebooks. The original Surface Book looked great, but it was heavy and cursed with old hardware. It took two generations for the Surface Laptop Studio to reach its potential, and by then it had become too expensive. Now Microsoft is achieving another feat for power users with the Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch machine that uses NVIDIA’s RTX Spark system-on-a-chip for powerful graphics and AI performance. It’s a direct MacBook Pro competitor, with no awkward hinges or removable screens like previous high-end Surface Notebooks.
“It’s the most powerful thing we’ve ever made,” Andrew Hill, Microsoft’s corporate VP of Surface, told reporters in a call with reporters. NVIDIA’s RTX Spark is a big attempt to compete with the latest chips from AMD and Qualcomm, and it’s notable for including 6,144 Blackwell GPU cores and 20 Arm CPU cores. NVIDIA claims it delivers 1 petaflop worth of AI performance (including its GPU, CPU, and NPU), and says its graphics performance is similar to an RTX 5070 laptop GPU (but with a power draw between single-digits and 80W).
However, at first glance, the Surfshark Laptop Ultra looks like a typical workhorse machine. You’ll have to look closer to see what really makes it special: a new 15-inch MiniLED Ultra screen with peak HDR brightness of up to 2,000 nits; The largest trackpad ever made by Microsoft; And all the ports you could want, including USB A and C, HDMI, and a full-size card reader. Like the MacBook Pro, the Surface Laptop Ultra is also less than 4.5 pounds. And to prove it means serious business, 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 talking hyperbolically about the greatness of the Surface Laptop Ultra. In an announcement post, he wrote: “A machine like this should not stand still. It should be pushed. Taken to the edge. Used to realize what others say is impossible. It is in the hands of world makers.”
It’s just a laptop, man.
Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a while for the Surface Laptop Ultra. Microsoft says it’ll be arriving this autumn, and of course, it’s not saying a word about pricing yet. I’m just hoping that the decline will give us some relief from RAMaggedon price pressure.
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