SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft on Wednesday set a $2,599 starting price for the Surface Laptop Ultra, its most powerful laptop to date, and opened pre-orders for the machine, positioning it as a direct challenger to Apple's MacBook Pro in the high-end market for creative professionals and software developers.

The 15-inch laptop undercuts Apple's 16-inch MacBook Pro, which starts at $2,999, by $400. Microsoft said the device is designed for "demanding creative, software development, AI, engineering, and 3D workloads," a pitch aimed squarely at the users who have made Apple's Pro line the default choice in many studios and engineering teams.

The pricing announcement followed a Windows and Surface event in San Francisco, Microsoft's first major Windows-focused showcase in more than two years. The company's last such event came in May 2024, when it unveiled Copilot PCs and laid out a strategy built around AI-ready hardware. Microsoft billed this week's event as focused on "how local AI will shape the next chapter of the PC."

Built around Nvidia's first PC superchip

At the heart of the Surface Laptop Ultra is Nvidia's RTX Spark, an Arm-based system-on-a-chip that combines an Nvidia Blackwell RTX graphics processor with up to 6,144 cores and an Nvidia Grace CPU with up to 20 cores. The laptop supports up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory, which is shared between the processor and graphics chip, and uses a new thermal design to handle the hardware's heat output.

Microsoft has said the laptop delivers GPU performance on par with Nvidia's RTX 5070 graphics card. The company also says the Laptop Ultra can run AI models with up to 120 billion parameters........

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