Microsoft has put a purchase price on its RTX Spark Surface hardware: Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599, while Surface RTX Spark Dev Box costs $5,999. Both opened for preorder on October 7, 2026, turning the company’s local-AI hardware plans into products developers can order.
Delivery comes later. Microsoft’s Surface preorder announcement sets October 16 as the laptop’s availability date. The Dev Box is available for preorder exclusively through Microsoft’s U.S. online store and is scheduled to begin shipping in November.
The purchasing decision centers on a shared proposition: NVIDIA RTX Spark hardware, configurations with up to 128GB of unified memory, and Microsoft’s claim that both systems can run models exceeding 120 billion parameters locally. That could give developers more room to experiment without sending every inference request to a cloud service.
But the hardware’s memory capacity, its advertised AI performance, and Windows’ agent-management roadmap describe different things. Some software capabilities are available now, others are approaching experimental preview, and important enterprise controls remain forthcoming.
Two Prices, Two Form Factors, No Proven Performance Gap
The laptop and Dev Box share the NVIDIA RTX Spark platform. Microsoft describes it as combining a Blackwell RTX GPU, a Grace CPU, and unified memory. The laptop’s maximum specifications include up to 6,144 GPU cores, up to 20 CPU cores, and up to 128GB of memory. Those are configuration ceilings, not a specification sheet for the $2,599 entry model.
The laptop’s starting price also understates how expensive a higher-end configuration can become. TechCrunch’s pricing report describes two base configurations at approximately $2,600 and $3,700, with memory and storage upgrades taking prices as high as $5,900. Those rounded figures complement Microsoft’s official starting price; they do not establish that every configuration includes the advertised maximum memory.
At the upper end, the laptop therefore approaches the Dev Box’s $5,999 price. Buyers should compare the actual configurations they need, rather than treating this as a straightforward choice between a $2,599 portable machine and a desktop costing more than twice as much.
The Surface Laptop Ultra product page lists a 15-inch touchscreen, a chassis under 18mm thick and under 4.5 pounds, and removable storage. It packages local-AI compute into a machine that can also serve as a developer’s primary computer.
