Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599 as Microsoft puts more AI work on the PC

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Running an AI model locally is more appealing when there’s still room for your creative apps and coding tools. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra puts up to 128GB of unified memory into a 15-inch laptop built around NVIDIA’s RTX Spark platform. It starts at $2,599, with preorders opening today and availability beginning October 16.

Today’s Windows and Surface launch also brings a $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for work that can stay at your desk. It ships in the US this November. The Windows changes reach beyond these two machines, with new controls for AI agents, local models working alongside cloud services and actions you can start from Search.

Price: Surface Laptop Ultra from $2,599 MSRP
Where to buy: Microsoft

Magnetic charging keeps USB-C useful

Magnetic Connect gives the Ultra a charging cable that attaches magnetically and releases easily, using the USB-C port on its right side. You can still use that port for video, data and other USB-C devices.

Bring back an SD card from a shoot and there’s a reader waiting for it, alongside two more USB-C ports, HDMI, USB-A and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Microsoft says the Ultra can drive up to three 4K external displays with compatible displays, cables and accessories. That gives a desk setup room for more than the laptop screen without making every connection depend on a hub.

The chassis is less than 18mm thick and under 4.5 pounds, with Platinum and Nightfall finishes on selected configurations. You can remove the storage drive for service or upgrades; available parts and service options vary by market, and repairs need to follow Microsoft’s service guidance.

Surface Laptop Ultra open, showing its display and keyboard. Image: Microsoft.

Surface Laptop Ultra closed, showing its exterior design. Image: Microsoft.

Shared memory for models and creative work

The Surface Laptop Ultra combines an NVIDIA Grace CPU with up to 20 cores and a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores. They share a memory pool of up to 128GB, giving local models, creative projects and developer tools room to run together. Those are configuration-dependent maximums. The GPU can address less than the full system memory, with its share depending on the configuration and workload.

The 15-inch PixelSense Ultra touchscreen is rated for up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness, measured over a 10 percent window. Sustained and SDR brightness are lower. For moving around a timeline or a large project, the haptic touchpad is 30 percent larger than the Surface Laptop 8th Edition’s.

Touch support comes with an important limit for artists: Surface Pen, Surface Slim Pen and similar pen accessories aren’t supported. You’ll need to factor that into a drawing workflow.

CUDA support connects the Ultra to NVIDIA’s development tools, while ray tracing, DLSS and NVIDIA Reflex are available in supported games. This is a Windows on Arm machine, so game compatibility still matters alongside the graphics features.

Qualcomm sees NVIDIA’s arrival as a boost for the wider Windows on Arm ecosystem, too. Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm’s senior vice president and general manager of compute and gaming, described the new Surface as a sign of the “momentum building beyond x86.”

A $5,999 Dev Box for the desk

If your model experiments can stay in one place, Surface RTX Spark Dev Box puts the same RTX Spark platform into a compact desktop with 128GB of unified memory. It’s aimed at developers running local inference, evaluating models and experimenting at their desks. The CPU and GPU share that memory, too; 128GB isn’t a separate GPU allocation.

It comes ready with Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub CLI, GitHub Copilot, WSL, Python and Node, cutting down the setup before you can start building. Preorders are $5,999 MSRP, exclusively through Microsoft in the US, and shipping begins in November.

What changes in Windows, and when

More memory only gets you part of the way to useful local AI. Software has to decide where the work goes. Microsoft’s hybrid intelligence plans for Windows combine models running on your PC with cloud models for tasks that need them. GitHub’s HydraFusion will bring that routing to the GitHub Copilot app, Copilot CLI and Visual Studio Code in experimental preview later in October.

Letting an agent do work also means deciding what it can touch. Microsoft Execution Containers, or MXC, is generally available on Windows 11 today, letting organizations set file and network access policies that are enforced while an agent runs. Codex, GitHub Copilot, OpenClaw, Replit, LM Studio, NVIDIA OpenShell and Unsloth AI already support it. Claude Code, Box, Egnyte, Heidi Health, Hermes Agent, Manus, Perplexity, Raycast and Simular are among those with support still to come.

Further controls are coming through Microsoft Entra and Agent 365, so organizations can distinguish an agent’s activity from its user’s and extend management to local agents. Governance at scale may require additional services. Microsoft describes local GitHub Copilot tasks such as investigating builds and proposing fixes on the new Surface hardware, with the separate Microsoft Dev Box cloud service supplying extra capacity when needed.

The more everyday change is in Windows Search. You’ll be able to type requests such as “dim my screen,” switch to dark mode, turn on Do Not Disturb or arrange your windows from the taskbar. Those actions begin rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel today. Optional Copilot integration in taskbar Search follows in select markets later this year.

Copilot’s broader changes are further out. Over the coming months, Copilot+ PCs are expected to gain local-context, local-action and local-model features, with your permission governing access to content and actions on your behalf. Windows Update is required, and timing and availability will vary by device, market and silicon platform.

For an always-on mini desktop, there’s also a simpler initial setup for popular agents, including a native Windows gateway and MXC integration for OpenClaw.

Microsoft’s new Windows Search interface. Image: Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Get Started experience for setting up agents on Windows. Image: Microsoft.

The launch extends beyond Surface

Beyond Surface, the systems named in Microsoft’s announcement include ASUS ProArt P14 and P16, Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition, HP OmniBook Ultra 16, Lenovo Yoga 9n 2-in-1 and MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+.

Price: Surface RTX Spark Dev Box $5,999 MSRP
Where to buy: Microsoft

For the Ultra, the practical question is how much memory your models and creative apps need to share, and whether you need to take that work with you. The Dev Box gives local experiments a permanent home at a desk. Surface Laptop Ultra availability begins October 16, and the Dev Box starts shipping in November; the new Copilot capabilities will roll out in stages.

Watch Microsoft’s Windows and Surface event

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