What the Surface Laptop Ultra is
Microsoft announced preorders on October 7, 2026. Pricing starts at $2,599, hundreds of dollars more than the existing 15-inch, $1,615 Surface Laptop 8, per PCWorld. Availability began October 16, and Microsoft's own announcement describes it as its most powerful Surface Laptop ever.
The chip is Nvidia's RTX Spark N1X, an Arm-based design. Microsoft says it was developed with Nvidia and MediaTek to run personal AI agents locally on Windows laptops and compact desktops. The Microsoft and Nvidia material lists these options:
- CPU and GPU: an 18-core CPU with a 5,120-core Blackwell GPU, or a 20-core CPU with a 6,144-core GPU.
- Unified memory: 24 GB up to 128 GB.
- Storage: 512 GB up to 2 TB.
- Display: a 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen, 3:2, 120 Hz, up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness.
- Ports: three USB-C ports with USB4, one USB-A, HDMI, a 3.5 mm headphone jack and an SD card reader. The right-side USB-C port has the new magnetic charging connection.
ZDNET tested the 20-core, 64 GB, 1 TB configuration. It prices that model at $4,299 and the 128 GB version at $5,899.
What ZDNET liked
- Build and input: a balanced, premium chassis at 4.4 lb, a large haptic touchpad and a keyboard comfortable for hours of work.
- Display and camera: a glossy screen bright enough to beat glare, and a 1080p Surface Studio Camera the reviewer called one of the best webcams he'd used on a PC this year.
- Battery: it comfortably outlasted a workday, even under demanding tasks. Microsoft's own estimates are up to 15 hours of local video playback and up to 12 hours of active web browsing. Microsoft notes that battery life varies significantly with settings and usage.
- Haptics: Windows haptic signals fire on actions such as resizing windows and aligning objects, but only in a few apps for now. The reviewer expects wider support because the effect lives at the OS level. Microsoft hasn't confirmed that.
What ZDNET didn't like
- Boot and restart: both were slow.
- USB-C dialog boxes: "ghost" dialog boxes kept appearing and disappearing, even with only the charger attached. Updates and switching to best-performance mode helped. This is one review unit's experience, not a documented fleet-wide bug.
- Everyday performance: multitasking with many apps, dozens of tabs and multiple displays was inconsistent. ZDNET also says the MacBook Pro M5 and Mac Mini M5 Pro beat it on some single-core tests. It published no numbers or methodology for that, so treat it as a directional claim.
The local AI experience
First boot offers optional local agents: Hermes, OpenClaw or Perplexity. ZDNET's experience shows how far this is from plug-and-play:
- WSL was missing. OpenClaw's gateway wouldn't connect until he installed Windows Subsystem for Linux, because its local gateway setup relies on a Linux environment managed through WSL.
- Setup took over an hour. That included the llama.cpp inference engine and downloading the Qwen3.8-27B model.
- The task only half worked. He asked an agent to sort about 100 loose JPEGs into folders by content. After a lot of back-and-forth it sorted them by EXIF capture date instead, which was still a useful starting point.
- Both tools were erratic. Hermes presented a helpful decision tree but sometimes stopped displaying inputs in chat while still recording them. OpenClaw needed ongoing tinkering to keep its gateway running. Both sometimes ran the fans hard for trivial requests, and other responses were near-instant.
- Some output was good. Inbox summaries and daily to-do lists built from what the agents could see in Chrome were often insightful.
The reviewer also gave the agent access to everything on the loaner PC and said plainly not to do that in practice. Treat that as a warning rather than a tip. Give a local agent only the folders and browser data it needs. Microsoft's own launch post says upcoming Windows capabilities will use Microsoft Entra to separate agent activity from user activity, and that Microsoft Execution Containers contain agents. Microsoft framed those as upcoming or containment features, so don't assume they replace sensible permissions today.
The best result was ComfyUI image-to-video generation. ZDNET reports 10-second clips in about 30 seconds and 20-second clips in about a minute, with Wi-Fi manually disconnected to show nothing went to the cloud. Those numbers come from his setup and aren't a universal guarantee.
Gaming
The Arm platform is the main caveat. ZDNET says it had to cut the settings substantially on Gears of War: E-Day, with DLSS on, to reach about 50 fps. Marvel Rivals, which runs natively on Arm, averaged about 60 fps below maximum settings. Less demanding titles such as Civilization VIII and No Man's Sky looked great on the display. Microsoft's own page says gaming performance varies by title, and that apps not built for Arm run through the Prism emulator.
How other reviewers compare
ZDNET's conclusions are broadly in line with other coverage, though the details differ:
- Tom's Hardware said the laptop is the most beautiful Microsoft has made and that RTX Spark is powerful for AI models. It also noted that nothing RTX Spark does makes Windows itself better yet.
- Engadget said the chip delivers gaming performance similar to an RTX 5070 laptop GPU, though its headline says the laptop still lags behind Apple.
- Tom's Guide praised it. It called the platform a trade of peak efficiency for a massive memory pool, almost desktop-class RTX gaming and superior local AI performance.
- Notebookcheck was more critical and described the machine as a bit disappointing. It also flagged the 2,000-nit mini-LED panel as a problem.
- Tom's Hardware, in its hands-on testing, raised the cost question directly. The price tags still buy a lot of cloud tokens from OpenAI and Anthropic. ZDNET argues the up-front cost makes more sense once you factor in token and cloud costs, but it offers no cost comparison. The privacy and savings benefits are potential, not demonstrated.
Reviewers also tested different configurations. Several tested 32 GB units, while ZDNET used 64 GB. Don't compare results across them without caution.
Is the future of Windows exclusive?
Not exactly. Microsoft's Computex post said RTX Spark would also power laptops from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI, plus small desktops from several makers. Microsoft is also selling a Surface RTX Spark Dev Box at $5,999. So this isn't a Surface-only phenomenon. It's a high-priced tier of Windows PCs built around local AI, and the Surface Laptop Ultra is one of its flagships.
Who should buy it
- A good fit: developers, creators and AI builders who regularly work with large local models, video generation or heavy rendering, and who accept the Arm compatibility trade-offs.
- A poor fit: anyone who mainly browses, writes documents, summarizes text or makes slide decks. Microsoft's own page says the standard Surface Laptop may suit those people better.
- Before buying: check app and driver compatibility if you rely on specialized hardware drivers, plug-ins or older utilities. Microsoft itself recommends this for Arm.
ZDNET's closing point is the fair one. If Microsoft and Nvidia want "an agent on every PC," local AI has to stop feeling like a beta test. The hardware is ahead of the software experience, and that gap, more than the price, is the main thing to weigh.