Microsoft launches Surface Laptop Ultra with Nvidia RTX Spark chip, takes aim at MacBook Pro

Microsoft has a new flagship laptop, and it was built to pick a fight with Apple. The Surface Laptop Ultra, unveiled October 7, 2026 at a showcase in San Francisco, is the first machine powered by Nvidia’s new RTX Spark superchip. Microsoft calls it the most powerful Surface device it has ever made. It also claims the laptop outruns comparable MacBook Pro M5 models on AI tasks. Pricing starts at $2,599, and configurations climb as high as $5,899. Pre-orders are open now, with shipping scheduled for October 16, 2026. What’s inside the box The heart of the machine is Nvidia’s RTX Spark. On one side sits a 20-core Grace CPU built on Arm architecture. On the other sits a Blackwell RTX GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, the parallel processing units that make Nvidia hardware so popular for AI work. The chip supports up to 128GB of unified memory. Unified memory means the CPU and GPU draw from one shared pool instead of keeping separate stashes. For AI work, that matters, because large models are memory-hungry and shuffling data between pools slows everything down. Microsoft says the system delivers 1 petaflop of AI compute. That horsepower allows the laptop to run AI models with more than 120 b...