At Computex 2026, Microsoft pulled back the curtain on what it calls its most powerful Surface to date. The Surface Laptop Ultra arrives this fall with clear ambitions of challenging Apple’s MacBook Pro directly.
The headline here is Nvidia’s freshly unveiled RTX Spark system on a chip. Microsoft has crammed up to 20 ARM CPU cores into this machine, paired with as much as 128GB of LPDDR5X unified RAM. Graphics come from a Blackwell GPU sporting 6,144 CUDA cores, which Microsoft estimates performs roughly on par with an Nvidia RTX 5070. Power consumption tops out around 80W, so think of it as a dialed-down version of that desktop card.
Thermal capacity gets a major boost too. Microsoft claims the Surface Laptop Ultra handles 2.5 times the thermal load of the Surface Laptop 7 15.
Display specs land at 15 inches with MiniLED Ultra panel technology, pushing 2,000 nits peak brightness in HDR mode. Weight checks in near 2kg, putting it in the same ballpark as Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro. Color options stay restrained: Black or Dark Silver.
Security comes via Windows Hello face recognition. Storage gets a user-replaceable SSD, a dig at Apple’s sealed designs.
Port selection goes beyond what Apple offers on its flagship. The Surface Laptop Ultra carries three USB-C connections, full-sized HDMI, an SD card reader, 3.5mm audio jack, and even a USB-A port for older peripherals.
Great selection of ports
Both the laptop and its new silicon are slated for a fall release. Microsoft held back on pricing, though market positioning against the MacBook Pro 16 suggests a starting point near €3,000 ($3,000). Fully configured with 128GB RAM and 2TB to 4TB storage, expect figures climbing toward €8,000 ($7,000).
The timing of this announcement puts Microsoft in direct competition with other hardware makers pushing new form factors this year. Asus unveiled its VM441 all-in-one PC powered by Snapdragon X processor earlier this spring, showing ARM-based designs are gaining traction across multiple categories. For gamers watching these developments, Alienware introduced an affordable gaming laptop option recently that takes a different approach to portable performance.
