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The Surface Laptop Ultra delivers on most of Microsoft's promises
Microsoft promises one machine for dev, AI, and gaming, and mostly gets there.
Over the past week, the laptop Microsoft sent me has been summarizing books and movies, generating images from my imagination, and running a 70-billion-parameter AI model that would be a stretch to fit on most laptops. It also played AAA games at a speed and fidelity I would have thought impossible on an ARM system just a year ago. Microsoft wants to sell you one computer for all of your needs, and for once that doesn’t feel like total marketing fluff. Mostly.
Microsoft is throwing both arms around the new Nvidia RTX Spark platform with the Surface Laptop Ultra—and setting its sights on the would-be MacBook Pro buyer, or as the company called it, “a high performance audience.” The bet is that rather than a gaming desktop for fun and a development laptop for work, buyers will pay more for one machine that does both.
The Surface Laptop Ultra arrives at a strange time in personal computing. Recent industry numbers showed a 20 percent drop in total PC shipments year over year in the third quarter of 2026. That’s not just consumer purchasing either—that’s across the board. Between the RAMpocalypse that has exploded consumer prices and an industry fixated on enterprise money, there hasn’t been much new hardware to excite PC enthusiasts.
Microsoft isn’t the only one debuting an RTX-chipped laptop. Dell’s XPS 16 Creator Edition and Asus’s ProArt series (our own Ryan Whitwam‘s review should be appearing on the front page soon) are betting on the chipset as well. The question when reviewing the Surface Laptop Ultra isn’t whether it can achieve the things that it claims competently, but whether there’s finally a compelling reason for power users to switch to an ARM system, and whether their daily workloads can still be achieved without hiccups when compared to a more traditional x86 offering, or the biggest competitor within the segment, the MacBook Pro.
With a starting price of $2,599, this is not a budget alternative to Apple silicon. This is bleeding-edge hardware, and you’re going to be paying a premium for it. Depending on your selected processor and memory options, MSRP can reach as high as $5,899. Prospective buyers should note that the lower-specced 24GB unified memory model ships with Windows 11 Home, while the rest of the fleet arrives with Windows 11 Pro. I received the 64GB model for testing, and I think that would probably be the sweet spot for a lot of users to align cost and performance.
I really have to wonder if 24GB is enough to go around when we know that Windows 11 is memory-hungry on its own. When you have to assign a significant portion of that 24GB of unified memory to VRAM for gaming, does performance suffer? An audience question inside the Surface Laptop Ultra review information session asked about the usefulness of the base model, and didn’t get much back other than a vague “useful for smaller models locally” answer. Microsoft may have a more definitive answer to that question a few months from now when software and drivers catch up with hardware.
So has the Microsoft and Nvidia team-up created the ultimate all-in-one laptop? Or is this the industry once again putting the hardware hype cart before the finished-software horse?
The 15-inch mini-LED display might not be enough to get folks to run to the Ultra on its own, but it’s a compelling reason to add it to the list. The 3270×2180 native resolution looks simply stunning whether you’re watching a 4K video, playing games, or just staring at a desktop spreadsheet. I preferred the Enhanced color profile, but Vivid and sRGB modes looked fantastic as well.
Blacks stayed deep against bright, vivid subjects without any sort of visible blooming. I wish I could say the same for my TV. While I can’t quantify how it stacks side by side with the latest MacBook Pro Retina display, I can say that this is a damn nice screen. Viewing angles are superb, colors are punchy, and the 2,000-nit p