Surface Laptop Ultra and RTX Spark reviewed!

Daniel Rubino (0:10)

Welcome to The Windows Central Podcast, episode 407 for October 16th, 2026

Everyone, Daniel Rubino here, joining Zac Bowden for another exciting episode of The Windows Central Podcast, this time in our respective remote locations, me in Massachusetts, Zac, and just outside of London, UK. This week, we have a little bit more focused of a podcast, as the RTX Spark laptops, which we talked about last week, our reviews have gone live. Well, Zac's review went live. I'm still working on mine. It's tough to run the site and do all my meetings and write reviews, especially when I did all this stuff. But we will be talking about specifically, the Surface Laptop Ultra, of course, so Zac reviewed that and I have both the ASUS ProArt P16. Actually, I have both the 3K model and the 4K model with 120 gigs of RAM, as well as the gorgeous HP OmniBook Ultra 16

We'll go through, talk about the hardware there, what we like, what we don't like, and what we learned about using RTX Spark in one week, along with that local AI thing that everybody keeps talking about. Then we'll also just wrap up the podcast with my thoughts and feelings on the ASUS Xbox Ally X20 handheld gaming PC, which is also now available for sale. ASUS kindly sent over their big package with where you get everything, including AR glasses, a dbrand case, the controller itself, and it's all in a giant Pelican case, which is kind of fun. So I'll go through that. I haven't used, I've used the original Ally, and I've now used the Ally X20. I haven't used the Ally X, or yeah, the regular Ally. So I'll share my thoughts on that. What makes this special? Zac, how are you doing on this very busy Friday for us?

Zac Bowden (2:10)

I'm tired. I've spent the whole week benchmarking and writing thousands of words about why chips and how they run and what they're good at, what they're not good at. I'm tired of looking at numbers and words, and I just want to go to bed.

Daniel Rubino (2:25)

Totally understandable. I know that feeling. I've been editing lots and lots of photos that I've been taking all week, and there's also been other announcements and other things to get done as well. They call this Techtober for a reason. Honestly, it's usually a phone thing, but this year it's definitely a laptop and PC kind of thing. I guess that's a good problem to have. Anyway, let's get right to RTX Spark review. So this was a staggered announcement process. So first Thursday, we were able to just review the chip, so basically talking performance, directly without addressing the actual laptops. And now today we can talk about the actual laptops. We also do have, I should say, the Yoga 9N from Lenovo review coming as well.

The only one we're kind of missing anything is the Dell XPS 16, which we'll probably get that in at some points. And the MSI, which I believe you are also working on getting in there. So we'll try to review as much as we can. The 14s, we'll have to kind of wait. The 14-inch models, there's a couple of those, but it looks like they're doing the 16s first. 10 laptops were announced with RTX Spark, but the Surface Laptop Ultra, which you reviewed, is arguably the most attention getting, as well as, as we talked about last week on the podcast, the most affordable at starting at $2,599, which is not, I didn't say cheap, I said affordable, most affordable.

But it is, it is by a couple hundred dollars cheaper than the other RTX Spark laptops. It doesn't necessarily make it better. I haven't actually been able to go through and read your review, so I guess this will be a good time for you to start to recap it for us. So tell us what you learned.

Zac Bowden (4:19)

Yeah, so here it is, all in all of its glory. It's as beautiful as you might expect it to be. It is very similar to a MacBook Pro in appearance. We've sort of discussed this to death, I think. And it's in its unescapable. It's something I sort of had to address in the review upfront, because it is a very similar looking laptop to a MacBook Pro, 15 or 14 inch or 16 inch, whatever they got on the upper side. And that's okay. I think that's fine. I think the fact that it looks like a MacBook Pro is not a bad thing in itself. In fact, I think Microsoft improves upon the MacBook Pro design in a number of subtle key ways that makes this laptop better looking than the MacBook Pro. While it may look similar, that doesn't mean it doesn't have, it's not identical. There are some differences, and side by side, I would pick the laptop Ultra over the MacBook Pro from a design perspective. For example, it doesn't have a notch, you know, relatively uniform bezels, really nice. Not just that, the keyboard deck, I think the corner radio on the chassis is nicer than the MacBooks. I think the keyboard deck, the fact that the way the keys are indented in the chassis is a lot more seamless than what you find on the MacBook Pro.