Surface Laptop Ultra review: powerful, bright, but heavy

Microsoft's new Magnetic Connect port is one of the most praised features. It behaves like the old Surface Connect, but through the USB-C port on the right side: bring the connector close and it snaps into place. The Verge calls it one of its favorite additions and notes you can reverse the magnetic end and use the cable's regular USB-C end to charge other devices.

The bigger promise is local AI. Ars Technica ran a 70-billion-parameter model on the review unit and used it to summarize books and movies and generate images, while also playing AAA games at speeds it called impossible on an Arm system a year ago. But The Verge warns that getting the most out of the machine requires coding experience or patience with models and AI agents, and calls local AI on Windows "messy" and "like a beta."

Criticism concentrates on three points. Reviewers describe the laptop as heavy and loud, and The Verge reports bugs with sound and display plus underwhelming CPU performance. Wired's main complaint is battery life, which it says cannot compete with the MacBook Pro, and it adds that some very popular games are not supported yet.

Ars Technica points out that the cheapest 24GB unified memory model ships with Windows 11 Home while the rest of the range gets Windows 11 Pro, and questions whether 24GB is enough given how memory-hungry Windows 11 is and how much must be set aside for VRAM in gaming. Wired also warns that lower-tier RAM options limit AI capabilities, and Microsoft's answer on the base model's usefulness was a vague "useful for smaller models locally."

All three outlets agree on the same core point: Windows does not yet take full advantage of the RTX Spark chip, and buyers are paying today for performance that software may unlock later. Ars Technica notes that Dell's XPS 16 Creator Edition and Asus's ProArt series are betting on the same chipset, so the Surface Laptop Ultra is not alone.

For buyers in Tunisia, the Surface Laptop Ultra is a premium machine with a premium price: at $2,599 and up, it costs far more than a typical laptop sold locally, and Microsoft has not announced Tunisian availability or pricing. Importing one would add shipping, customs and no local warranty on the specific model.

If your work is on-device AI development or heavy creative workloads and you want one machine that also games, the reviews suggest the hardware is genuinely capable, especially the 64GB model Ars Technica calls the sweet spot. If you mainly want a fast, quiet laptop with long battery life, the MacBook Pro remains the safer pick until Windows 11 and its drivers catch up with the RTX Spark hardware.