Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra Is Official and Starts at $2,599

Yesterday the Surface Laptop Ultra was a spec sheet Microsoft had confirmed nothing about. Today Microsoft put the machine on a stage in San Francisco and confirmed nearly all of it, along with the one number the leak never had. The entry configuration costs $2,599.

Microsoft calls this its first "builder class" PC, built for developers and AI researchers rather than for people who want a nice Windows laptop. At $2,599 to start, it sits well outside normal Surface territory. You do not buy this one because your old laptop got slow.

The leak held up

The leak described a 15-inch mini-LED panel at 2,000 nits, a chassis under 18mm and around 4.5 pounds, a haptic trackpad about 30 percent larger than the one on a typical 15-inch Surface notebook, two RTX Spark tiers at 5,120 and 6,144 GPU cores, and up to 128GB of unified memory on the top builds. Microsoft confirmed all of it. The display is a PixelSense Ultra touchscreen in Surface's usual 3:2 shape, and Microsoft says its 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness is the brightest of any laptop.

One claim shifted in the retelling. The leak said Microsoft would promise 99.6 percent of performance on battery. On stage, Microsoft said the laptop keeps 99 percent of its power when unplugged. Those are close, but they are not the same sentence, and neither has a reviewer's benchmark behind it yet.

What Microsoft added

The ports were not in the leak. You get USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a full-size SD card reader, and a new Magnetic Connect port that puts magnetic charging and an ordinary USB-C jack in the same hole. Magnetic Connect replaces Surface Connect, the proprietary charging port Surface has used for years. Microsoft says this is the most ports it has ever put on a Surface Laptop. If you have ever packed a dongle bag for a shoot, that does more for your day than any core count on the slide.

Microsoft rebuilt the cooling too, and claims 2.5 times the thermal capacity of existing Surface Laptops, out of two fans and side vents that work as both speakers and exhaust. The component access screws sit under the laptop's feet, which is a small detail that matters the first time you want the thing opened. Colors are Platinum and Nightfall. The headline compute figure is 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance.

The price list is still incomplete

The base model starts at $2,599. Gizmodo rounds that to $2,600 and reports the entry build ships with 24GB of RAM. The event liveblog listed $2,599.99 for the 5,120-core GPU paired with an 18-core CPU, and $3,699.99 for the 6,144-core GPU with a 20-core CPU. Microsoft has not published a full configuration table, so the rungs between 24GB and 128GB have no prices attached. If the reason you want this laptop is the big memory pool, you still cannot find out what it costs.

For context, the HP OmniBook Ultra 16, another RTX Spark laptop, starts at $3,200. On that comparison Microsoft is the cheap option, which is not a thing anyone expected to write about a Surface.

Every number here belongs to Microsoft and NVIDIA

One petaflop of FP4, 2.5 times the thermal capacity, 99 percent of power on battery, and the brightest peak HDR of any laptop are all vendor claims delivered from a stage, with no independent testing behind them. Microsoft also says the laptop runs Gears of War: E-Day at a solid frame rate, and that RTX Spark laptops will run the next Call of Duty natively, which the event dated to 2027. Engadget's hands-on found the machine attractive and otherwise conventional, and made the point that buying this much silicon to browse, edit video or play games is overkill.

Microsoft built this for people who can name the workload that needs 128GB of unified memory. If you cannot name yours, the rest of the Surface line still exists and costs far less.

When you can get one

Preorders opened today. Gizmodo reports an October 16 launch, the same Friday the other RTX Spark laptops ship: the Lenovo Yoga 9n 2-in-1, Asus ProArt P14, Dell XPS 16, MSI Prestige N16 and HP OmniBook Ultra 16, all of which also went up for preorder today. Microsoft announced a Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at the same event, preorders from $5,999 and shipping in November, for anyone who decides the laptop is not enough machine.

The first independent numbers will not exist until units ship around October 16. Until then, every performance figure attached to this laptop belongs to the companies selling it.