Microsoft prices its RTX Spark Surfaces: $2,599 to $5,999

Microsoft has put prices on its Nvidia RTX Spark machines. The Surface Laptop Ultra starts at $2,599.99 and ships October 16. The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a small desktop, costs $5,999.99 and ships in November. It is sold only through Microsoft.com in the US. Pre-orders opened at Microsoft's October 7 event.

The $2,599 price gets you an 18-core CPU, a 5,120-core GPU and 24GB of unified memory. The full chip has 20 CPU cores and 6,144 GPU cores, and it comes with 32GB at $3,699.99. The top laptop has 128GB and costs $5,899.99, about the same as the Dev Box. The Dev Box comes with 128GB, a 2TB SSD, and VS Code, WSL, Python and GitHub Copilot already installed. Microsoft says both machines can run AI models of more than 120 billion parameters locally.

Other details: a 15-inch 120Hz touchscreen, a removable SSD, and a magnetic USB-C charging cable that comes off if someone trips over it. There is also a trade-in offer of up to $1,000 for MacBook Pro owners, so Microsoft is clearly targeting Apple.

Why it matters: you can now run 120B-parameter models on a laptop you buy at a store. The catch is that you need the $5,899 model to get the memory those models require.