Microsoft has opened preorders for the two halo devices of its Nvidia RTX Spark push, making the pricing and shipping dates concrete. The Surface Laptop Ultra, first shown earlier this year, ships on October 16 and starts at $2,599 for an 18-core CPU, 24GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. The most expensive configuration, at $5,899.99, pairs 128GB of RAM and a 20-core CPU with 1TB of storage.
Hardware-wise the Laptop Ultra has a 15-inch HDR touchscreen that peaks at 2,000 nits, a larger haptic trackpad, and Nvidia's Arm-based RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of unified memory. The port selection is unusually generous for a premium ultrabook: three USB-C ports, HDMI, a single USB-A, a full-size SD card reader and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The aluminium chassis is openly aimed at the MacBook Pro.
The most distinctive detail is charging. Microsoft is calling it Magnetic Connect: the cable snaps magnetically onto the right-hand USB-C port, replacing the proprietary Surface Connect port the company dropped from its smaller Surface devices last year. It is still a proprietary connector, but the USB-C port underneath continues to handle video, data and ordinary USB-C duties — so a standard cable is never strictly required.
The $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is the other half of the launch. It also takes preorders now and ships on November 24. Its flat, 3D-printed anodised aluminium chassis doubles as a heatsink and echoes the vents on an Xbox Series X. Inside there is 128GB of unified memory, a 100-watt thermal envelope and Nvidia Tensor cores — enough, Microsoft implies, for local AI work on models exceeding 120B parameters, agent prototyping and on-device coding tools. It is one of Microsoft's Project Zenith devices, so it ships with a developer-optimised Windows 11 Pro setup and Visual Studio Code, Git, GitHub CLI, GitHub Copilot, WSL, Python and Node already installed.
Both machines sit above Nvidia's own DGX Spark mini PC on price. The reason is not only positioning: PC component costs, memory in particular, have been climbing hard through 2026.
