Microsoft has opened pre-orders for its most powerful Surface laptop so far. Surface Laptop Ultra was announced on 7 October at a Windows and Surface event in San Francisco, and Microsoft says it starts at $2,599 (MSRP), with availability beginning on 16 October.
Prices as of 8 October 2026, 5:20 AM IST, on Microsoft's own store pages: the US page lists the starting model at $2,599.99 and the UK page at £2,599.00. Microsoft's India website does not list the laptop. Its India address sends visitors to the US product page, so there is no official rupee price yet.
What is inside
The laptop is built around NVIDIA's RTX Spark Superchip. That pairs an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU with up to 6,144 cores and an NVIDIA Grace CPU with up to 20 cores. Memory goes up to 128 GB in a unified pool that the CPU and GPU share.
Microsoft claims up to 1 petaflop of AI performance and says the machine can run AI models with more than 120 billion parameters on the device. The footnotes are worth reading. The petaflop figure is a theoretical FP4 number that uses sparsity, and the share of memory the GPU can address depends on the configuration and is less than the total.
The screen is a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra touchscreen. Microsoft quotes peak HDR brightness of 2,000 nits, measured on a 10 per cent window, and says that is up to 25 per cent brighter than the MacBook Pro M5 Pro on published specifications. Sustained and SDR brightness are lower, and the panel does not support pen input.
The body is under 18 mm thin and under 4.5 lb, or roughly 2 kg. Microsoft says a new cooling design gives up to 2.5 times the thermal power capacity of its current Surface Laptops. The touchpad is 30 per cent larger, the storage can be removed by the owner, and the colours are Platinum and Nightfall.
Magnetic charging on USB-C
The design change Microsoft is most keen to talk about is Magnetic Connect. The supplied charging cable attaches magnetically to the USB-C port on the right side and pulls away easily, while the port still handles video, data and other USB-C devices. The laptop can run up to three 4K displays.
Microsoft is pitching the machine at creators, developers and people building AI tools, with local models inside GitHub Copilot as one example. It also says games on Windows on Arm support ray tracing and DLSS in supported titles. As with the Snapdragon-based Surface Pro 12 and Surface Laptop 13, anyone relying on specialist Windows software should check that it runs well on Arm before buying.
The Dev Box and the US trade-in offer
A desktop companion, the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, is on pre-order for $5,999 (MSRP), only on Microsoft.com in the US, with shipping from November. Business configurations of the laptop are also on pre-order.
In the US and Canada, Microsoft is offering up to $1,000 cash back between 7 October and 23 November for buyers who trade in an eligible MacBook Pro through its online store. The trade-in value depends on the device and its condition, and the offer does not apply in the UK or India.
What Indian buyers should expect
A straight currency conversion of the US price would not account for Indian taxes, duties and local pricing, so it is better to wait for Microsoft India's own figure. For a sense of where high-end laptops sit in India this season, our check of the MacBook Air's Indian price from Rs 1,49,900 is a useful reference.
The laptop launch came with a wider Windows push. Microsoft made Microsoft Execution Containers, a way to limit which files and networks an AI agent can reach, generally available on Windows 11, and said it is bringing local models such as MAI Code 1.1 Flash to devices like this one. It also said ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI have new machines built for the same idea, so buyers in the US and UK will have alternatives to compare once those prices are out.
