How Microsoft built its MacBook Pro competitor

Microsoft put its latest laptop through a series of durability checks at a windowless lab on its Redmond, Washington, campus. The Surface team uses robots to press buttons thousands of times, tests devices with radio waves, and drops objects from increasing heights.

The Surface Laptop Ultra is the first device built around Nvidia’s RTX Spark, an Arm-based chip that combines a CPU and GPU. Microsoft says it can run compressed AI models with 280 billion parameters locally, and is targeting developers working on local AI as well as creative professionals. The company says the chip’s unified memory also supports creative workloads in Blender, Premiere, and Photoshop.

Microsoft had wanted its 2024 Copilot Plus PC push to compete with both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but said chips available at the time could not deliver MacBook Pro-level computing. Microsoft corporate vice president of Surface Brett Ostrum said Nvidia was a logical choice after the company demonstrated its chips’ AI capabilities. The companies worked together for several years on the new laptop.

Configurations start at $2,599.99 with 24GB of RAM; a model with 128GB of memory costs $5,899.99. The laptop has an aluminum body, HDMI and SD card ports, a touchscreen, and a design intended to make repairs easier. Most games are not native to the Arm chip and require emulation. The Verge’s Tom Warren briefly played an emulated version of Gears of War: E-Day and reported smooth performance.