microsoft The new laptop has Nvidia Prices for the AI chips start at $2,599 as software makers look to bring more artificial intelligence features into their consumer devices.
Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Windows and devices, said at an internal event in San Francisco on Wednesday that the Surface Laptop Ultra is available for pre-order now and will begin shipping on October 16th. This computer features the world’s first magnetic USB-C port, including: apple’s The MagSafe charging connector and two other standard USB-C ports, Microsoft said in a blog post.
Researcher Gartner estimates that Microsoft Windows is the most popular operating system for PCs, but the company is not among the top six PC vendors by unit shipments. As the AI boom matures and chip technology advances, Microsoft, Apple, google We aim to enable users to run more AI workloads from their own devices instead of relying on the cloud.
Users can install and run different models on their new laptops without worrying about high monthly bills. Microsoft first mentioned the Surface Laptop Ultra in May, but is now revealing more details.
Max Weinbach, an analyst at Creative Strategies, wrote after the X announcement that “Microsoft might just switch me back to Windows.”
Davouri also said meta is introducing a version of its popular Muse AI agent for Windows, capitalizing on the growing popularity of personal agents that have surpassed ChatGPT to the top of Apple’s App Store.
Microsoft is still trying to solidify its role as a major player in AI. The company offers its own AI models, but one benchmark shows they’re less popular than mainstream models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and they’re not at the forefront in terms of performance. Recent research suggests that developers are more likely to have used alternatives.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has tried to capitalize on the AI boom as a way to boost sales of its devices.
In 2024, the company introduced the Copilot+ PC standard. This, along with a compliant Surface computer, requires the inclusion of a neural processing unit that guarantees minimal AI performance. But Microsoft has since “simplified product naming to lead the Surface brand while continuing to deliver premium hardware and hybrid AI experiences,” a spokesperson said.
The new devices feature up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory and can deliver up to 1 petaflops of compute power. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at an event Wednesday that the Blackwell RTX Spark GPU inside the computer has the same processing power as Nvidia’s 2016 DGX-1 data center server, which cost $250 million.
The presenter showed how an app on the Surface Laptop Ultra routes some AI coding requests that run on the computer’s local GPU and sends them to the cloud, displaying things like a green leaf icon. Through Windows 11, developers can limit their coding agents to Microsoft execution containers to prevent unwanted system access.
Microsoft is updating the setup experience for Windows 11 devices to help users quickly start using the open source OpenClaw AI agent software.
Microsoft has been selling its own computers since 2012, and CEO Satya Nadella suggested Tuesday that the company’s position in the market is evolving.
“I think today is the day we start talking and thinking about how the frontier ecosystem will probably take on a slightly different contour two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now,” Nadella said at the event. “The classic edge that distributed computing will always remain distributed will become even more true.”
Spotlight: Microsoft announces Muse for Windows
