In my line of work, I have to listen to a lot of puffery from the mouths of people who are always trying to sell me something. From the first time I saw it at Computex 2026, Microsoft told me the Surface Laptop Ultra was a computer it always wanted to make. I’ve heard the line a dozen times before from a dozen brands. Now, after testing it for more than a week, I’m more convinced than ever this is Microsoft’s best laptop yet. This is the exact kind of no-holds-bar PC I’ve longed for.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Even at its enormous maximum Apple-like $5,900 price point, the Surface Laptop Ultra is not quite the MacBook Pro analog that pundits would have you believe. It’s heavier and thicker than Apple’s latest MacBook Pros. It’s also not as performant as the M5 Max MacBook Pro, at least not in terms of raw number crunching for both CPU and GPU capabilities. That matters, of course, but not as much when you consider the other benefits of this laptop and the wider Nvidia RTX Spark platform. These are high-performing laptops that don’t trade off battery life for the sake of pumping out that extra power.

It's a super solid laptop with several unique capabilities. If you can get over the quirks of its ARM-based platform, it offers portability and power in one place.

There are trade-offs aplenty. Nvidia’s still working through the rough edges of its ARM-based design.

Source link