Microsoft Comes to Kill the MacBook Again
Microsoft is back to their old familiar role: would-be Apple assassin.
But whereas Windows may have effectively stunted the Mac back in the day, in recent years, they've failed to put a dent into iPad and MacBook sales (and I won't even bring up the Windows Phone/iPhone competition because there was none). And that's despite multiple attempts with various Surface devices. But if at first you don't succeed...
Its latest laptop, the product I’m here to see, really needs to hold up. The Surface Laptop Ultra isn’t just another high-end config of the Surface Laptop, it’s the debut platform for Nvidia’s RTX Spark — Nvidia’s entrance into the world of Arm-based PC chips, and a chance to blow expectations out of the water when it comes to what a Windows laptop is capable of.
Microsoft’s last big laptop push — the Copilot Plus PC initiative from 2024, focused initially on Qualcomm chips — “was really aimed at MacBook Air,” says Brett Ostrum, corporate vice president of Surface at Microsoft. Microsoft also wanted to go head-to-head with the MacBook Pro, but existing chips weren’t capable enough. “We knew that was not going to reach MacBook Pro-level compute.”
Yeah, that's true, but the problem was that the 'Copilot+ PC' initiative not only failed to make a dent in MacBook Air sales, it just, well, failed. To the point where Microsoft has quietly pivoted away from the strategy.
Around that time, Nvidia began privately showing off what its forthcoming chips could handle when it came to AI, and Microsoft jumped at the possibilities. “It literally made a ton of sense for us in terms of how to go and compete with the MacBook Pro,” Ostrum says. “Nvidia was a logical choice.” The two companies have spent the years since working hand in hand, resulting in today’s launch.
Ah yes, "pay no attention to those 'AI PCs' – these are the real 'AI PCs'". And I mean, maybe. Though I've been skeptical from the get-go about just how much traction NVIDIA and Microsoft will actually get here.
I think the "Hybrid Intelligence" approach – running some AI locally and some in the cloud – is a smart thing to tout, but it's also essentially what Apple has been touting since their initial (failed) attempt to reboot Siri ('Private Cloud Compute' was born for the workloads that couldn't be done on-device – which ended up being pretty much everything). Now that Siri seems to be working, Apple too is leaning more into this hybrid AI approach.
But Microsoft has something Apple doesn't here: NVIDIA.
The RTX Spark chips inside the Surface Laptop Ultra are geared toward local AI workloads and creative tasks. Microsoft says it’s powerful enough to handle compressed 280 billion-parameter AI models running locally — models that needed to run in the cloud only a year ago.The RTX Spark is both CPU and GPU, and the GPU should be able to handle Blender 3D objects with ease and cruise through other creator workloads in Premiere or Photoshop thanks to the system’s use of unified memory — the same approach Apple takes on its M-series chips.
While the actual benchmarks won't be out until these devices hit the streets, early indications indicate that these machines should be better at local AI but likely worse at "regular" computing tasks versus the MacBook Pro. Perhaps even MacBook Pros with less powerful chips. Perhaps quite a bit worse...
And that's fine! The recent Mac mini boom has proven there's clearly a market for machines to do AI locally, but Microsoft is trying to have it both ways here:
Microsoft is largely positioning the Ultra at developers who want a powerful GPU for local AI compute, but it’s also targeting the creatives and professionals who would buy a MacBook Pro. “It is built for us,” says Jit Hirani, lead designer for Surface devices. “We come to work to build a product for ourselves.”
Again, I'm skeptical of it getting much inroads with that latter group. The price is fine, starting at $2,599 (for a model with 24GB of RAM), but if you're really serious about these AI workloads, you're going to want the 128GB version, which is $5,899. Again, what's the size of that market? Certainly versus those who might buy the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for $100 more, which will be far more capable as an AI machine given that it doesn't need to focus on laptop elements like power consumption.
Meanwhile, Apple has gone the other way, introducing the MacBook Neo, which is devouring the lower-end of the laptop market where Windows (and Chromebooks) have long dominated. The other PC makers have quickly pivoted their focus to that colorful space, but they're having a hard time doing the whole 8GB of RAM thing with Windows.1 And RAM prices are ripping that market apart...
But hey, cool magnetic USB-C power cable though. Take that, Apple!
There is one obvious angle for killing the MacBook Pro: gaming. PCs have held the ecosystem advantage here basically forever and this space, of course, is how NVIDIA first made a name for themselves, long before the world had heard of LLMs. But:
As this is an Nvidia laptop, you can also use it for gaming, but I get the sense that Microsoft is treading carefully about positioning this as a gaming laptop. The RTX Spark is an Arm chip, which means most games aren’t native and will have to be emulated. Still, I got a chance to briefly play an emulated version of Gears of War: E-Day on the Surface Laptop Ultra, and it ran buttery smooth, even transitioning between the laptop being plugged in and running off battery without a performance hit.
I would imagine the situation won't be as bad as it proved to be with Copilot+ PCs due to Qualcomm chip capability issues, but this is still ARM at the end of the day. And ARM is not x86...
One more thing: not mentioned here is the ultra elephant in the room: Apple's forthcoming new MacBook Pro. Not only will that match any touchscreen advantage the Surface has, performance-wise, it may blow these machines even further out of the water – again, at least on the "traditional" computing side. While it's obviously still just rumored, I think it's safe to say it will destroy the sales of these Surface machines when it's released.
The 'MacBook Ultra', a 'Surface Laptop Ultra' killer?
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 At some point, Microsoft is going to acknowledge that Windows is the actual problem here. At the end of the day, they simply cannot destroy any MacBook when the any PC they dream up has to run Windows. ↩