Microsoft Launches $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra to Take on MacBook Pro
Microsoft has announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, a high-end notebook featuring an Nvidia RTX Spark chip designed to compete with the MacBook Pro. The company is also launching a dedicated developer box and offering financial incentives for users to switch from Apple devices.
Why it matters
This represents a significant escalation in the hardware competition between Microsoft and Apple in the professional creative and developer markets.
Microsoft today announced launch timing and pricing for the Surface Laptop Ultra that it unveiled earlier this year.
The 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra is priced starting at $2,599, undercutting Apple's $2,999 16-inch MacBook Pro , and it targets the same creator and developer market. Microsoft says it is built for "demanding creative, software development, AI, engineering, and 3D workloads."
Microsoft's new laptop uses an Nvidia RTX Spark chip, which includes an Nvidia Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores and an Nvidia Grace CPU with up to 20 cores. It supports up to 128GB of unified memory and has a new thermal architecture to support the hardware. The RTX Spark is an Arm-based chip, so the laptop runs Windows on Arm with x86 apps using Microsoft's Prism emulation.
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