The Surface Laptop Ultra finally has a price and release date, plus a clever breakaway USB-C port

Published Oct 7, 2026, 1:51 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Summary The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,600 and pre-orders are open now, with a ship date of October 16th. Microsoft says the powerful laptop has been built around Nvidia's RTX Spark, with local AI, creative workflows, and high-end gaming in mind. The tech giant says the Surface Laptop Ultra is capable of 99% of its GPU power while running on battery. At Computex back in May, Microsoft showcased the Surface Laptop Ultra, its new laptop powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark chip. While we got a decent look at its sleek design, it was still unclear how much it would cost or when it would be released. Fast-forward a few months to Microsoft's first Surface event in a few years, and we now know the high-end Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,600 and that it's available to pre-order now, with a launch date of October 16th. The laptop has long been positioned by Microsoft as the most powerful Windows 11 laptop out there, with the tech giant emphasizing that it can handle everything from local AI computing to creative workloads and high-end gaming, thanks to its powerful RTX Spark chip. With the Surface Laptop Ultra's power and the ongoing memory shortage in mind, it's not entirely surprising its entry-level price landed at $2,600. The entry-level configuration features a Surface Laptop Ultra with a 15-inch mini-LED screen, a sizable haptic trackpad, three USB-C ports, 24GB of RAM, and Nvidia's 18-core RTX Spark Arm CPU and a Blackwell GPU with 5,120 CUDA cores. During its Surface keynote, Microsoft showed off the Surface Laptop Ultra's breakaway magnetic USB-C port for the first time The tech giant says the laptop was built from the ground up for the RTX Spark During the Surface keynote, Microsoft revealed other interesting details about the powerful laptop, including that it features "the world's first built-in magnetic USB-C charging." The new magnetic charger looks sort of like Apple's proprietary MacBook MagSafe power connector, but built on the more open USB-C standard. The tech giant also confirmed that the Surface Laptop Ultra can maintain 99% of its power on battery, ensuring users still have access to nearly all the RTX Spark's power when on the go. As expected, the tech giant also talked up the Surface Laptop's AI capabilities, with EVP of Windows and DevicesPavan Davuluri emphasizing that the company "built the Surface Laptop Ultra around Nvidia's RTX Spark." He added that users "can run models on this laptop that simply don't fit on a traditional machine." During the keynote, Microsoft confirmed that several games will run on the ARM-based RTX Spark at launch, including the recently released Gears of War: E-Day, along with World of Warcraft: Forever, Arc Raiders, World of Warcraft: Forever, Cyberpunk, and several more. Given the powerful laptop's Nvidia Blackwell GPU, this is pretty expected. Along with confirming the Surface Laptop Ultra's price and pre-order date, Microsoft also revealed that the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box starts at $6,000.