Microsoft revealed pricing for a new line of Nvidia-powered Windows PCs at a San Francisco event Oct. 7, according to TechCrunch and The Verge. The lineup includes the Surface Laptop Ultra and a developer-focused Surface RTX Spark Dev Box.
The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599 for a configuration with an eight-core CPU, 24 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabytes of storage, and ships Oct. 16, The Verge reported. Higher configurations run up to $5,900, and the top tier was already out of stock at launch, according to TechCrunch.
The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box starts at $5,999 and ships in November with VS Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, Windows Subsystem for Linux and PowerShell 7 preinstalled, TechCrunch reported. Both machines run on Nvidia's RTX Spark Arm-based chip and are built to run AI models locally without a cloud connection, according to the two outlets.
Microsoft is also offering up to $1,000 in trade-in credit for MacBook Pro owners, a push aimed at developers who switched to Macs, TechCrunch reported. Chief executive Satya Nadella said at the event that AI workloads need "orchestration" and "memory outside of the model," not just faster inference, according to TechCrunch.
For developers who want to run models locally instead of renting cloud GPUs, a $5,999 dev box with Copilot CLI built in is a concrete price to weigh against a cloud bill, though it still costs more than Nvidia's own DGX Spark mini PC from last year.