Microsoft says new $2,599 laptop with Nvidia chip outperforms MacBooks

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 CPU, co-designed with MediaTek, and Nvidia claims up to one petaflop of AI compute. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus and MSI are shipping machines built on it. That puts Nvidia into a laptop market Intel and AMD have shared for decades.

It gets there on someone else’s instruction set.

Grace is built on Arm’s architecture, licensed from the Cambridge company Nvidia agreed to buy for $40B and could not, after regulators objected and SoftBank confirmed the deal dead in February 2022. Every RTX Spark laptop now pays Arm a royalty instead.

The buyers are the problem.

European laptop shipments are forecast to fall 6.4% this quarter and 20% in the fourth, with desktops down almost 30%, as memory costs raise system prices and companies stretch their refresh cycles. Gartner does not expect AI PCs to be a majority of shipments until 2028.

Microsoft’s pitch has an unusual audience.

Its executives argued that running AI on the machine in front of you is cheaper and more secure than paying a cloud provider. The Dutch tax office reached that conclusion about its email this week, and is moving it off Microsoft’s cloud onto its own servers.