Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra is a 15-inch laptop built around an Nvidia chip, and it is aimed squarely at the MacBook Pro. It costs £2,599 in the UK and $2,599.99 in the US, and pre-orders opened on 7 October, and Microsoft says sales begin on 16 October. Microsoft first previewed the laptop on 31 May.
An Nvidia chip, not Intel or AMD
The laptop uses Nvidia’s RTX Spark superchip, which combines a Blackwell RTX graphics processor with 6,144 cores and an Nvidia Grace CPU of up to 20 cores. It offers up to 128GB of unified memory shared between the CPU and GPU, and up to 2TB of storage that Microsoft says is upgradeable. Microsoft quotes up to 1 petaflop of AI performance, a theoretical figure for a low-precision (FP4) format with sparsity, and says it can run local AI models of up to 120 billion parameters. Brett Ostrum, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Surface, calls it “the most powerful Surface Laptop ever built”.
The chip is Arm-based, so the laptop runs Windows on Arm and handles x86 apps through Microsoft’s Prism emulation, MacRumors reports. That is the main thing to check before buying: whether the apps you rely on run well.
Screen, build and ports
The 15-inch touchscreen is a mini-LED “PixelSense Ultra” panel at 262 pixels per inch, runs at 120Hz, covers 100% of the DCI-P3 colour range and reaches 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness on a small white window. Microsoft calls it “the brightest display we’ve ever shipped”. It does not support a pen. MacRumors adds that Microsoft claims the peak HDR brightness is 25% higher than on the MacBook Pro M5; that is Microsoft’s own claim.
It weighs under 4.5lb (about 2kg) and is under 18mm thick, and comes in Platinum and Nightfall. You get three USB-C ports (one with built-in magnetic charging), a USB-A port, HDMI, an SD card reader and a headphone jack, and it can drive up to three 4K external displays with compatible accessories. The touchpad is 30% larger than on the Surface Laptop 8th Edition, and the storage is user-removable. Microsoft says it has the largest cooling system ever in a Surface, with fans that run slower, and up to 2.5 times the thermal capacity of the 15-inch Surface Laptop (8th Edition). The company also publishes repair guides and sells parts through the Microsoft Store and iFixit.
First impressions
Engadget’s Devindra Hardawar got his hands on it and says it “feels better than any other Windows laptop I’ve held before”. He found the aluminium body clean and minimalist, the display surprisingly bright and the haptic touchpad smooth, and says it is lighter than Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro. A game, Gears of War: E-Day, ran smoothly at slightly more than 1080p, both plugged in and on battery.
There are no benchmarks or battery tests in that piece, and the author says he has not seen the machine handle heavy AI work yet. He notes it is aimed at developers and power users, and that “it had better be good” at that price. A separate Tom’s Hardware test headline says the chip “impresses in local AI, but gaming isn’t its strong suit”; we could not read the full article.
What we still don’t know
Microsoft promises “all-day battery life” based on internal testing of pre-release units, but gives no hours, so real-world battery life is unknown. A Surface Laptop Ultra for Business version is also on pre-order. The “up to $1,000” trade-in offer applies only in the US and Canada. We have not tested the laptop, so performance and thermal claims are Microsoft’s. We will update this article when full reviews are available.
Surface, Windows and Copilot are trademarks of Microsoft. Ctrl + Alt News is independent and is not sponsored or endorsed by Microsoft or Nvidia. Microsoft’s images are used for editorial purposes.
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