LIVE from San Francisco!

Daniel Rubino (0:09)

Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Windows Central Podcast, episode 406 for October 7th, 2026 Hey, everyone. Daniel Rubino here, joined in person with Zac Bowden.

Zac Bowden (0:21)

Hello.

Daniel Rubino (0:22)

We are live from San Francisco. Although you may be listening to this recorded later on, but technically, right now, we are live. So we are just coming from the Microsoft Windows Surface events. We're going to kind of recap the news and all the big things there, and our thoughts on stuff. Zac, how are you doing San Francisco?

Zac Bowden (0:45)

I'm really liking it. It's a very interesting city. It's a massive hill, essentially, isn't it?

You're constantly walking up to get anywhere.

Daniel Rubino (0:52)

Yeah. It's a quick reminder of how out of shape you are. As usual, the weather is fantastic, so it's pretty great to be here. We used to come out here a lot, at least I did for Microsoft Build, but the sense moved out to Seattle, now it's come back and all that. It's kind of cool to be back in the city, though. But I guess let's just jump into it. Sacha Nadella was there, Jensen Wong from Nvidia was there, and it was a pretty big event. It was a large press gathering, a lot of international press as well. Not so much on the influencers side, and that kind of makes sense. Yeah. There were no surprises per se either, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there was this chance we're thinking maybe there'd be some sort of like really big news, but that did not happen.

So the big thing I think was Surface Laptop Ultra, which was announced back in June, basically got all the details filled in that we were looking for, including pricing, availability, pre-orders, and that secret port. So why don't you recap on the things that we learned today, and then we'll go into sort of what we thought about.

Zac Bowden (2:08)

Yeah. So we'll start with the pricing. So I think that was the biggest mystery that people were wondering about this device. How much was this going to cost? People had numbers ranging into the $3,000 sort of part of the pricing bracket. But luckily, it wasn't as bad as we were expecting. It starts at $2,599. That's only $100 more than an equivalently specced MacBook Pro 14-inch.

So that's really not that bad. That naturally the 18-core RTX Spark with 5,120 GPU cores, 24 gigs of RAM, and one terabyte of storage. Weirdly, you can only get it with one or two terabytes. There's no super-crazy internal storage like you can get on the MacBook Pro.

Daniel Rubino (2:49)

Yeah. So we were looking at the MacBook Pro for pricing comparisons. I even forgot you can scale that thing up to eight terabytes.

Zac Bowden (2:56)

Yes, you can.

Daniel Rubino (2:58)

It was over 10 grand.

Zac Bowden (2:59)

Yeah, 10 grand.

Daniel Rubino (3:00)

So but yeah, you can only do two terabytes on this device, which is a little weird.

Zac Bowden (3:04)

It is strange. I don't know why they've given it that limitation. Maybe because you can upgrade the storage yourself on Surface Laptop Ultra. It has a removable SSD, so you could just do that yourself after the fact, I guess, which I think most people would prefer to do anyway, instead of grouping up for that extra grand storage.

Daniel Rubino (3:18)

It would be cheaper to probably go your own way, because you had eight terabyte and hitting over $10,000.

Zac Bowden (3:24)

So yeah, so $2,599 starting. It maxes out at $5,900, and that's for the very high-end 20-core RTX Spark with 128 gigs of RAM, and one or two terabytes of storage. That's obviously very expensive. That's more aimed at AI developers. There's two very distinct categories that this laptop's aimed at, AI developers and content creators. Content creators can get away with the lower spec'd ones, or 24 gigs or 32 gigs of RAM.

If you're doing any on-device AI running local models or something, you will want to spec it with at least 64, ideally 128 gigs of RAM to run the 120 billion parameter models that Microsoft is touting this laptop can run. So keep that in mind if you are looking at this device and interested in doing some local AI stuff, you will want to get as much RAM as you possibly can to do so. So yeah, that's the pricing availability. Pre-orders are live now.

It starts shipping October 16 In fact, all of the RTX Spark laptops start shipping on October 16 It was really interesting. Dan found this out. I think Ben did the article earlier. The Surface Laptop Ultra is the cheapest RTX Spark laptop you could buy. How has that happened?