Microsoft event debuts new AI-friendly hardware and Windows changes

What happened: At its first live event in two years, Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, plus changes coming to Windows 11 and a vision for local-AI and agentic workflows. Key numbers: Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599, ships October 16, preorders open, up to 128GB LPDDR5x unified Why it matters: The Surface Laptop Ultra is Microsoft's first device using the Nvidia RTX Spark SoC, and unified memory allocation lets it handle gaming and local AI work without a traditional gaming GPU. The Dev Box ships with a developer-optimized Windows 11 build.

At its first live event in two years, Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, plus changes coming to Windows 11 and a vision for local-AI and agentic workflows.

The Surface Laptop Ultra is Microsoft's first device using the Nvidia RTX Spark SoC, and unified memory allocation lets it handle gaming and local AI work without a traditional gaming GPU. The Dev Box ships with a developer-optimized Windows 11 build.