Microsoft's new Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599

The event marks Microsoft's first live hardware showcase in two years, and its centerpiece — a laptop built around Nvidia's new RTX Spark SoC — is aimed squarely at people who want to run AI models locally rather than pay for cloud access. By leaning on unified memory allocation instead of a traditional GPU's physical VRAM limits, the Surface Laptop Ultra can handle everything from modern games like Gears of War: E-Day to AI development and deployment, which is why Microsoft showed off graphical performance alongside developer tools.

The software side matters just as much. Microsoft outlined a Copilot overhaul split into Home, Code, and Autopilot tabs, a new Windows Search experience that can execute system-level tasks directly from the search bar, and a concept it calls "Hybrid Intelligence" — a move away from cloud-backed AI toward local frameworks like llama.cpp and models from the Deepseek and Nvidia Nemotron families. Paired with Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), a framework that confines agent activities to a sandbox and lets admins set guardrails per agent, the company is clearly trying to answer the obvious objection: that handing AI agents access to your files is risky.

Whether that works is the open question. The article notes that questions about security and user acceptance remain, especially given Microsoft's past missteps and other recent AI agent mishaps — so the bet on local AI hinges on whether buyers trust the sandboxing enough to let agents act on their machines, and whether reviewers find the hardware worth its $2,599 entry price.