The Surface Laptop Ultra is an AI monster with a laptop problem | usagoldmines.com

Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop Ultra is powered by a Mediatek CPU and Nvidia’s powerful RTX Spark SoC, which is mainly designed to run local AI models on the user’s lap. Five competing laptops—from Dell, HP, MSI and more—will offer additional options.

Microsoft is banking on near-future AI developers and enthusiasts running local AI models and tools directly from their PC. If needed, they’ll tap Microsoft’s Copilot AI for more horsepower. Microsoft calls this “hybrid intelligence” and it’s basically an acknowledgement that users won’t necessarily care which device does what. It’s a compromise, as is most anything that’s AI-related in productivity.

Users will be able to run models locally, but the Surface Laptop Ultra ships with a 140W power adapter. That means it’ll consume much more power than typical laptops, but not gaming laptops. Yet even gaming has questions: Microsoft showed just a single Gears of War game running on the Ultra, with no indication of frame rate.

I left the Windows and Surface Event with a question that no one at Microsoft could answer: What will be the battery life of these laptops? In one demonstration, Microsoft employee Kayla Cinnamon proudly put the Surface Laptop Ultra into “airplane mode,” showing how the laptop could run entirely disconnected from a network.

(Microsoft’s official stance: “Battery life details for Surface Laptop Ultra will be shared closer to availability,” reads the Ultra’s spec page. “It varies based on usage, settings, configuration, and other factors.”)

But these laptops may not even work on airplanes. For one, 140W is more than some airplane power outlets can supply—110W to 150W is typical. And will you be able to run AI agents continuously throughout a 13-hour flight from San Francisco to Taiwan? I very much doubt it. We don’t even have a reliable way to test the battery life while churning tokens.

All of these unknowns left the analysts I spoke to shaking their heads. Who’s going to buy these devices? The $2,599 price is the base, which means as users scale up to more and more memory—to run larger and more powerful AI models—the price will balloon with it. We’re still in 2026, a time when the $699 Apple MacBook Neo blew up headlines.

“I think it’s very obvious that no one wants to spend all this crazy money [on cloud AI],” said analyst Bob O’Donnell, principal at Technalysis. But how users want to divvy up their work between slower local AI and faster, more expensive cloud models remains to be seen.

It seems we have a new breed of laptops that might not really be laptops at all—they may not have the battery to last with how much power they chug, and they can’t plug in while on the go. They’re “portable” AI workstations for a niche of users who are willing to pay more than what it costs for a normal productivity laptop, for “productivity” loathed by some of its users. Whew.