Microsoft opened preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra on October 7 with an entry price of $2,599, and said the machine will begin shipping on October 16. It is the first laptop built on NVIDIA RTX Spark to go on sale.
The hardware itself is not new. Microsoft unveiled the laptop on May 31 ahead of Computex and showed it again at its Windows event this week. What arrived on October 7 was the price and the ship date, which had been outstanding for more than four months.
What the $2,599 Surface Laptop Ultra gets you
The entry configuration is not the headline specification. According to VideoCardz, the $2,599 model uses the reduced RTX Spark part with an 18-core CPU, a 5,120-core Blackwell GPU and 24GB of unified memory. The full chip pairs a 6,144-core Blackwell RTX GPU with an up-to 20-core Grace CPU at 600 GB/s, so the base machine is a long way from the 128GB flagship.
Microsoft’s own product page describes the top configuration as the first Surface Laptop to pair a Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 128GB of unified memory and full CUDA support. Microsoft rates the platform at one petaflop of FP4 AI compute and says it can run models exceeding 120 billion parameters locally.
The rest of the specification is a 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen rated at up to 2,000 nits peak HDR brightness and 262 pixels per inch, a haptic trackpad, three USB-C ports, Windows Hello face sign-in and a storage drive the owner can replace.
That memory is the whole argument, and Microsoft has put numbers on it. Against a MacBook Pro 16-inch with M5 Pro, the company claims its RTX Spark PCs are 2.1 times faster to the first token, 4.3 times faster at AI image generation and 6.2 times faster at AI video generation. Those are vendor measurements, and the laptop-class comparison is the one buyers care about.
The RTX Spark laptop field
Surface Laptop Ultra is not alone. Microsoft named the machines opening for preorder on the same day: the ASUS ProArt P16 and P14, the Dell XPS 16 Creator Edition, the HP OmniBook Ultra 16, the Lenovo Yoga 9n 2-in-1 and the MSI Prestige N16 Flip AI+. All of them ship on October 16, the same date as Microsoft’s own machine.
Two desk machines join it. The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, which Microsoft describes as local AI compute for developers evaluating models, ships to US customers in November. Further up, the DGX Station for Windows was previewed for models at the trillion-parameter scale, running on a GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip with 748GB of coherent memory and up to 20 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute.
HP’s pricing surfaced early. A listing for the OmniBook Ultra 16 was spotted before the event with prices running from $2,999 to $4,999, which puts Microsoft’s entry point below its partner. NVIDIA maintains a product page for the RTX Spark platform covering the chips themselves.
No Philippine pricing yet
Microsoft has not announced local pricing or a Philippine release date for the laptop or any of the partner RTX Spark machines. The $2,599 figure is the US entry price, and the peso equivalent after duties and taxes will be meaningfully higher (given that Microsoft Surface laptops are not officially available in the country).
That has been the pattern with this class of machine. RTX Spark laptops that ASUS has already lined up for the Philippines arrived with local pricing attached only closer to launch, and the same is likely to hold here.
We have also tracked how quickly the previous generation of Windows on Arm hardware reached local shelves, including the Snapdragon X Elite Googlebook, and pricing has been the deciding factor for Filipino buyers every time.
Worth waiting on one number
Microsoft has not published full configuration pricing, so the cost of the 128GB variant that makes the local model story work is still unknown. Review units were under embargo until the ship date, which means the performance claims are, for now, Microsoft’s own.
Preorders are open now through Microsoft and its retail partners. The laptops begin reaching customers on October 16.
Giancarlo Viterbo
Giancarlo Viterbo is a Filipino Technology Journalist, blogger and Editor of gadgetpilipinas.net, He is also a Geek, Dad and a Husband. He knows a lot about washing the dishes, doing some errands and following instructions from his boss on his day job. Follow him on twitter: @gianviterbo and @gadgetpilipinas.
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