Microsoft Is Hunting the Mac Developer: The Nvidia-Powered Surface Laptop Ultra Costs Up to 5,900 Dollars, and It Offers Up to 1,000 Off for an Old MacBook Pro

In June, Nvidia announced it had signed deals with Microsoft and a number of other manufacturers for "AI and agent-ready" Windows PCs built on its RTX Spark chip. There were no details at the time. Now there are - along with prices. At an event in San Francisco, Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra: the base model starts at 2,600 dollars (about 2,240 euros), the more powerful version at 3,700 dollars (about 3,180 euros), and with more memory and storage the price goes up to 5,900 dollars (about 5,070 euros). The most expensive configuration, according to the company, has already sold out.

Alongside the laptop is the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box workstation, from 6,000 dollars (about 5,160 euros), with Microsoft's developer tools pre-installed: VS Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, WSL and PowerShell 7. The promise for both machines is the same - AI models running locally, on the device itself, and for free, thanks to the processor, graphics, unified memory and improved cooling. Free, once you've paid a few thousand dollars for the hardware.

The more important news for the ordinary user isn't the laptop but the software. The machines run a reworked Windows 11 with a feature called Execution Containers, which locks AI agents into an isolated environment. It will reach all Windows 11 users, CEO Satya Nadella said. "One of the things we've realised in the last three or four years is that the model by itself doesn't do much. You really need to orchestrate and have memory outside the model," he explained, adding that Microsoft is enabling this "not just for our apps, but for anyone's agent. That's what the Windows platform will be for from now on."

Microsoft makes no secret of who it's hunting. Anyone who trades in a MacBook Pro gets a discount of up to 1,000 dollars (about 860 euros), because the Mac has become the favourite machine of developers and AI-agent enthusiasts, especially in Silicon Valley. Just in case, Microsoft promises that machines with such powerful graphics will also be good for video, content creation and gaming. At the same time, Dell published details of its XPS 16 Creator Edition with the RTX Spark chip, available to pre-order for 3,800 dollars, shipping at the end of October.

These aren't laptops for an office at the town hall. They're machines for people who want AI agents working on their own hardware rather than in someone else's cloud. But the message is longer than the spec sheet: the war between Microsoft and Apple is no longer about whose operating system looks better, but whose computer the agents will live on. And for that, Microsoft is ready to pay you for your old Mac.