Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop Ultra finally has a starting price (you should sit down)

Microsoft announced pricing and a launch date for its Surface Laptop Ultra at a showcase event in San Francisco on Wednesday. The laptop launches October 18, with a starting price of $2,599 for the lowest-tier configuration and pricing that goes up to $6,000. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended the event.

The Surface Laptop Ultra runs Nvidia's new RTX Spark processor with Windows on ARM and offers up to 128GB of unified memory — a single pool of memory shared across the system's components. Its 15-inch HDR display reaches 2,000 nits, and the aluminum body includes a large haptic touchpad, nearly invisible cooling vents, rounded edges, and a magnetic USB-C port called "magnetic connect" that snaps the charger into place. Microsoft says it spent several years developing the laptop and showed multiple design iterations at the event.

Five other RTX Spark laptops were also at the event, from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI. They carry similarly premium features — OLED displays, haptics, and up to 128GB of unified memory — and similarly high price points. All six machines are aimed at AI power users, creators, and developers; they can run games but are not explicitly marketed as gaming laptops. Demos showed workflows in Blender, ComfyUI, and Photoshop running large local models that previously would have needed the cloud. The Surface Laptop Ultra and the other five RTX Spark Windows PCs are available for preorder today starting at $2,599, with general availability on October 16.

Why it matters: The six RTX Spark laptops target a niche power-user audience, and their pricing limits them to a subset of the consumer market. Microsoft is positioning the Surface Laptop Ultra as the flagship of the RTX Spark lineup and as a leader in Windows' "hybrid intelligence," which aims to make the transition between cloud and local processing more seamless.