By Darius Popa
Publication Date: 2026-10-07 19:26:00
Microsoft priced its first Nvidia-powered Surface at $2,599.99 and claimed on stage that it doubles a MacBook Pro M5 on local AI prompts, without publishing how either figure was measured. The chip inside is built on Arm’s architecture, from the Cambridge company Nvidia failed to buy in 2022.
Microsoft has priced its first Nvidia-powered laptop at $2,599.99 and opened pre-orders. It says the Surface Laptop Ultra returns prompts from locally run AI models twice as fast as Apple’s MacBook Pro M5, and generates video six times quicker. It has published no test methodology for either claim.
Executives made the comparison on stage in San Francisco on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported. Microsoft’s own product page carries the price, a processor of up to 20 Nvidia Grace cores, up to 128GB of unified memory and up to 2TB of storage.
The only measurement it footnotes is the screen. Peak brightness of 2,000 nits, it says, measured over a 10% window with HDR content, against laptops available in October 2026. The Apple numbers get no equivalent.
We asked the price question on Wednesday morning.
Our launch preview noted that analysts thought cost was the open question, because a memory shortage had pushed hardware up and Nvidia had raised its DGX Spark by about 75%, to $6,950. At $2,599.99 the Surface undercuts a 16-inch MacBook Pro by roughly $400.
The chip is the more interesting part.
RTX Spark pairs a Blackwell graphics processor with Nvidia’s Grace…
