Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra has built-in magnetic USB-C charging

Tom Warren is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.Microsoft has created a magnetic charging solution for its Surface Laptop Ultra that uses USB-C. After scrapping its proprietary Surface Connect magnetic charging on its smaller Surface devices last year, the Surface Laptop Ultra has a charging cable that attaches magnetically to the right-side USB-C port.During Microsoft’s Windows event on Wednesday, Windows and Surface chief Pavan Davuluri said that you can just “bring the connector close, and it snaps right into place.“ It’s still a proprietary solution, but the USB-C port it slots into still works for video, data, and other USB-C connectivity like you’d expect. Microsoft is calling it Magnetic Connect, and I’m surprised the company hasn’t shortened that to Mag-C.Microsoft first announced its Surface Laptop Ultra earlier this year, which comes equipped with Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip capable of handling gaming, creative workloads, and on-device AI models. The Surface Laptop Ultra is available for preorder now and starts shipping on October 16th. It starts at $2,599 with an 18-core CPU, 24GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Tom Warren