By Sean Hollister
Publication Date: 2026-10-15 16:00:00
Fourteen years ago this month, Microsoft released an Nvidia-powered Windows PC that would become one of the greatest tech flops in modern history. The original Microsoft Surface, which ran a stripped-down version of Windows on an Nvidia Tegra chip, bombed so hard that Microsoft had to write off $900 million in inventory.
The problem was that Nvidia’s Arm chip couldn’t run existing Windows apps. Buyers had to leave their legacy programs behind.
This Friday, October 16th, Nvidia will once again be at the heart of Arm-powered Windows PCs with the first wave of RTX Spark laptops. But now, the company says, they’ll run everything. Adobe. Office. Blender. Even games that require kernel-level anti-cheat.
“All your apps, all your games, everything’s going to run great on Spark,” Nvidia senior director of products Justin Walker told journalists last week.
I’m willing to bet most Verge readers don’t have up to $7,000 burning a hole in their pockets for an unproven local AI workstation with 128GB of RAM. Even if you do, I’m not sure you’ll appreciate the tradeoffs of a thin laptop maxing out its GPU to produce “free” tokens locally. As Tom notes, it’s much slower than AI in the cloud.
But it’s hard not to be excited for a future where Arm chips can do all the other things we expect of Windows PCs.
Nvidia held an Editor’s Day in San Francisco last week to drive…
