By Ryan Smith
Publication Date: 2026-10-16 17:00:00
Amid the many trends and stories shaping the hardware world in 2026, the final quarter shows a confluence of several influences. AI continues to loom over everything this year, both client and server, and 2026 picks up where 2025 left off, with an even heavier emphasis on inference. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s latest efforts to bootstrap its Windows-on-Arm ecosystem are making good progress, thanks to another generation of improvements to its x86-on-Arm Prism emulator. And finally, amid all this, the client hardware market is trying to make sense (and cents) of a run-up in DRAM and NAND prices.
As we enter the fall, these trends conveniently converge in a single device: Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra. The company’s latest-generation flagship Surface laptop, the Ultra, is unlike anything that came before it, with Microsoft going above and beyond to develop a high-end laptop that, well, can go above and beyond…
