💻 Surface Laptop Ultra is the most excitingly powerful Windows 11 laptop in years
🪙 Wrapped in a premium aluminum chassis that feels like one solid block of metal
📺 2000-nit 15-inch mini LED display is searingly bright with fantastic contrast
🫨 Haptic touchpad simulates clicks and adds a tactile confirmation while hovering over Windows 11 elements
🧲 Magnetic Connect charging solution gives you the covnence of magnets while giving you a USB-C port
🎮 Runs Gears of War: E-Day, Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Fortnite, Pragmata, and more ray-traced games at a smooth 60+ frames per second at full resolution
💪 Ready for heavy creative applications like Adobe Premiere Pro and Unreal Engine 5
🤖 Hyrbid Intelligence promises to save tokens by running all but the most challenging AI tasks locally
The Surface Laptop Ultra is shaping up to reinvent PCs as we know it. Even if it comes at a steep $2,599 starting price, this machine will give the MacBook Pro it’s biggest fight in years. Equipped with Nvidia’s new RTX Spark ARM processor promise top performance for both creative tasks and ray traced gaming, and
At Microsoft’s launch event in San Francisco, we got an even closer look at the device than our first hands-on from Computex 2026. Microsoft highlighted the Surface Laptop Ultra’s gaming performance, running Gear of War: E-Day at full resolution and 120fps – though with the help of DLSS 4.5 and Frame Generation. I could also talk all day about how good the Surface Laptop Ultra’s new Magnetic Connect charging solution that still uses USB-C – move over MagSafe.
The Surface Laptop Ultra also showcases how Microsoft is further integrating AI into Windows. It can support a variety of locally-run AI models including Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, Perplexity, and even Facebook Muse. Additionally, Microsoft is integrating AI into even something as integral as Windows Search, which promises to give you a more contextual and deeper Windows search experience than ever before.
That’s just our (second) initial thoughts of the Surface Laptop Ultra and we’ll be testing the device ahead of its October 16 release date.
Full Review
😍 A real beauty. The Surface Laptop Ultra is a beautiful piece of machined aluminum. There are no gaps and hardly any screws to suggest anything less than a solid block of milled aluminum. The chassis is also impressively thin at 18mm, but it looks even thinner thanks to its raised pedestal design. Despite all the power and Microsoft’s most powerful cooling system yet (more on that later), it weighs under 4.5 pounds, just like the MacBook Pro.
📺 2000-nit HDR display. Opening the lid with a single finger reveals an equally beautiful 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen with a 2880 × 1920 resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. The display also delivers 4K TV-level HDR brightness, up to 2,000 nits. It makes games look especially fantastic. I was blown away by how good the sun-drenched rainforest scenes from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looked on the Surface Laptop Ultra. Even this Windows 11 desktop that Microsoft chose shows how much contrast the Surface Laptop Ultra can display.
🫨 Haptic touchpad. The trackpad on the Surface Laptop Ultra is the largest Microsoft has put in any Surface device, and it now also vibrates with haptic feedback. What’s interesting is Microsoft doesn’t just use haptics to simulate a mouse click, but the trackpad also vibrates while you hover over the X-button to close applications. Alternatively, the haptics shake when you bring a window to the top of the screen and drag it along different split-screen presets. Even though it’s entirely virtual, the haptics add nice tactile confirmation as you interact with elements in Windows. I hope Microsoft adds more soon.
🥊 A huge contender. The Nvidia RTX Spark is bolting out of the gate with some of the biggest specs we’ve seen for a laptop processor. It features a custom 20-core Grace CPU that promises up to one petaflop worth of AI performance. Nvidia says this is the first time a device has been powerful enough to run 120-billion-parameter AI models on-device rather than systems with multiple GPUs or through the cloud with servers.
The onboard graphics offer an equally impressive 6,144 Blackwell CUDA cores, which should closely match the graphics performance of an RTX 5070 laptop GPU, though with a maximum power draw of 80W. Configurations can also feature up to 128GB of shared memory; however, I also saw plenty of machines with just 64GB of RAM, and Nvidia has told journalists that some configs will have as little as 16GB of RAM.
🎨 Creative workflows. Windows on ARM will be a hurdle for Microsoft and Nvidia to clear with the Surface Laptop Ultra and other RTX Spark laptops, but both companies are already working hard to ensure everything works when they launch this fall. On the smaller scale, Adobe is already optimizing Premiere Pro. Nvidia presented a shootout between Premiere Pro and Premiere Pro enhanced for RTX Spark, and the latter rendered a scene 2x faster. The RTX Spark will also have accelerated 4.2.2. video support, so you’ll be able to take footage straight from your Canon, Nikon, Sony, or DJI Pocket 4 and edit in full resolution without any stuttering, whereas current devices require down-res proxies to smoothly play back media.
I also flew seamlessly around a five-kilometer square virtual environment in Unreal Engine 5, all running on a Surface Laptop Ultra. Even more impressive, Nvidia’s Prism software emulated the environment for the app to run, and Nvidia claims it adds only 5%-10% CPU overhead.
🎮 All the gaming-ready RTX features. The Surface Laptop Ultra comes with a Blackwell GPU that supports all of Nvidia’s major gaming features to date. That includes DLSS 4.5 features like the 2nd-gen transformer model, Multi-Frame Generation, Nvidia Reflex, and path tracing, which just became available on games like 007 First Light, Control Resonant, and the newly released
The RTX Spark’s sheer GPU power lets this machine run Gears of War: E-Day at full resolution, 120fps, and with high settings including RTX ray tracing. However, it was only capable of this performance because it was also running the game with the help of DLSS and 3x Multi-Frame Generation. I’ve also previously seen this machine run Alan Wake 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at full resolution with well over 60 fps – again with DLSS and 2x MFG, with hardly any latency. It remains to be seen how much navtive game support ARM will get, but the Surface Book Ultra seemed to have no issue playing Pragmata and Fortnite through an emulator.
🧲 Move over MagSafe. Perhaps even more impressive than the performance is Microsoft has come up with a new Magnetic Connect charging solution that would even make MagSafe evangelicals jealous. The twist of this new Magnetic Connect is it still uses a mostly traditionally USB-C plug. It’s just a tiny bit shorter, which is what allows it to safely snap onto the the Surface Laptop Ultra’s rightside USB-C port. Microsoft also cleverly made the Magnetic Connect compatible with its new 140W USB-C charger, so you can flip the cable around a still charge all your regular USB-C charging devices.
💨 Proper cooling. A Surface Laptop Ultra running at full tilt sounds about as loud as a portable fan on full power. Microsoft told me the fans in this laptop are the biggest fans it’s ever put in a Surface device, giving it 2.5x that of the Surface Laptop 8th Gen. Aside from bigger fans, Microsoft has carefully engineered its thermal solutions with a new copper cold plate and vents so the airflow can hit every component before the heat gets pushed out.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam
The hardware is genuinely impressive, and running the hard tasks in the cloud while keeping the rest local is a sensible split. What I'd want the full review to test is whether any of that stays yours when you change models or move apps. "My reading: the personal computer is being repositioned as something more than a terminal for intelligence rented from somewhere else." https://www.thesingularityproject.ai/p/microsoft-moves-beyond-the-model