Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra to Start at $2599

At its 10-7 Windows event today, Microsoft expanded on how it will bring AI agents to Windows 11. But all eyes were on Surface Laptop Ultra and the other Nvidia RTX Spark-based PCs that will launch a week from Friday.

And on that note, Surface Laptop Ultra will start at $2599. I assume that’s for the models with 32 GB of unified RAM, which will target creators. There will also be 128 GB configurations that cost more, aimed at makers. (Separate from the Microsoft event, HP announced that its OmniBook Ultra 16 will start at $3199.)

Microsoft’s Pavan Davuluri positioned the new generation of RTX Spark-based PCs as a more premium tier above Copilot+ PC aimed at creators and makers who need the most powerful local AI capabilities. Or, what Microsoft is now called Hybrid Intelligence, an orchestrated system in Windows that uses local AI when possible and cloud AI when required. This, he said, was how Microsoft would bring the frontier AI ecosystem to everyone.

There are a lot of moving parts here, including the Microsoft Execution Containers (MEC) container technology announced in preview at Build 2026 in June and now generally available, a new generation of powerful local AI models from multiple third parties, Windows ML, and more. And the first integration point will be Search in the Windows Taskbar, which will integrate with the new Copilot app and use your entire PC as context if you allow it.

That new Copilot app was built for Hybrid Intelligence, Microsoft said. It will use local context like your files, take actions locally at no cost, and make it easy for anyone to build and share native Windows apps using a single prompt and running against local AI. This, Davuluri said, “transforms the PC into a personal software factory.”

Microsoft is partnering with Hermes, OpenClaw, Perplexity and others on the local AI integrations and it is partnering with Nvidia and several PC makers on that new generation of maker PCs. But there’s new software coming, too. Call of Duty is coming to RTX Spark in 2027. The Get Started experience in Windows 11 is being updated to support AI agent configurations. Copilot will be able to perform more actions on your behalf, not just by configuring Windows settings, but also by sending text messages and more.

As for the hardware, it’s all available for preorder today. The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2599, as noted, and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box with Project Zenith starts at $5999. A bit further down the road is a new supercomputer called the DGX Station for Windows, a tower design that can run a trillion parameter models locally using “last quarter’s frontier models.” It’s coming later this year.

More soon.