It also played AAA games at a speed and fidelity I would have thought impossible on an ARM system just a year ago. Microsoft wants to sell you one computer for all of your needs, and for once that doesn’t feel like total marketing fluff. Microsoft is throwing both arms around the new Nvidia RTX Spark platform with the Surface Laptop Ultra—and setting its sights on the would-be MacBook Pro buyer, or as the company called it, “a high performance audience.” The bet is that rather than a gaming desktop for fun and a development laptop for work, buyers will pay more for one machine that does both.
The Surface Laptop Ultra arrives at a strange time in personal computing. Recent industry numbers showed a 20 percent drop in total PC shipments year over year in the third quarter of 2026. That’s not just consumer purchasing either—that’s across the board.
Between the RAMpocalypse that has exploded consumer prices and an industry fixated on enterprise money, there hasn’t been much new hardware to excite PC enthusiasts. Microsoft isn’t the only one debuting an RTX-chipped laptop. Dell’s XPS 16 Creator Edition and Asus’s ProArt series (our own Ryan Whitwam‘s review should be appearing on the front page soon) are betting on the chipset as well.
The question when reviewing the Surface Laptop Ultra isn’t whether it can achieve the things that it claims competently, but whether there’s finally a compelling reason for power users to switch to an ARM system, and whether their daily workloads can still be achieved without hiccups when compared to a more traditional x86 offering, or the biggest competitor within the segment, the MacBook Pro.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
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