Surface Laptop Ultra reviews: Nvidia-chip flagship praised for hardware, queried on AI and battery

Left · 2The Verge and Wired both published reviews on 16 October 2026 of Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra, a 15-inch Windows laptop that Microsoft built with Nvidia to showcase Nvidia's new Arm-based RTX Spark (N1X) chip. 1 2 Left · 2Both reviewers present it as Microsoft's most credible answer yet to Apple's MacBook Pro: The Verge says Microsoft has finally built hardware to rival Apple's pro laptops, and Wired says it is "trading blows with the very best". 1 2 Left · 2The chip comes in an 18-core version with 5,120 GPU cores and a 20-core version with 6,144 GPU cores, and uses unified memory shared by the CPU and GPU, which both reviews tie to running AI models locally; The Verge lists the base model at $2,599 with 24GB of memory and the top model at $5,899 with 128GB. 1 2

Left · 2Both praise the build and input hardware: an all-aluminium design, a large haptic trackpad, a 3:2 touchscreen, and a magnetic charging connector that works through the right-hand USB-C port. Wired also calls the keyboard and the four speakers excellent. 1 2 Left · 2Both describe the display as the brightest Microsoft or any laptop has shipped, but they give different specifications: The Verge calls it a 15-inch MicroLED panel with up to 2,000 nits of peak HDR brightness at 262 pixels per inch, while Wired says it uses Mini-LED backlighting at 257 pixels per inch and measured 1,945 nits in HDR with a colorimeter. 1 2 Left · 1Wired's main complaints are the battery life, a highly reflective screen, a mediocre 1080p webcam and the power button's placement, and it says gaming is limited by an 80-watt cap and by emulation on Arm, so most games need medium settings or lower; it also reports up to 20 percent faster frame rates than an M5 Max MacBook Pro in Cyberpunk 2077. 2

Left · 1The Verge's reviewer, testing the $5,899 model, says local AI is "much messier" than the promise: AI agents such as Hermes and OpenClaw required fiddling, running a large model made the fans run at full throttle even for a simple photo-conversion task, and an OpenClaw smart-home dashboard request ended in an error after 30 minutes. 1 Left · 1The Verge says the value of local AI lies in overnight or large-dataset jobs and in privacy, since transcription of audio and video could run locally, and concludes the laptop suits people with coding experience or patience to experiment; it also reports a battery indicator that dropped from 100 to 97 percent on unplugging, speaker pops, display lag and ghosting, and slow reboots. 1 Left · 1Microsoft spokesperson Moses Nsereko told The Verge the 97 percent reading is by design: the device pauses charging when full and resumes at 95 percent to reduce battery wear, the indicator shows 100 percent while plugged in, and it shows the exact level on unplugging. 1