Microsoft is holding a Windows and Surface event in San Francisco on Wednesday, 7 October, at 10am Pacific time. That is 8pm in Kenya. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chairman and chief executive, is on the bill, with Pavan Davuluri, executive vice president for Windows and Devices. Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia, will be joining. Microsoft says the three will talk about “how local AI will shape the next chapter of the PC”, and cover “latest innovations across Windows, NVIDIA RTX Spark, Surface and the broader PC ecosystem”.
Huang is there because of RTX Spark. RTX Spark is Nvidia’s chip for Windows laptops and small desktops, announced on 31 May. It puts a 20-core Grace processor, built on Arm rather than the usual Intel or AMD design, next to a Blackwell graphics chip with 6,144 CUDA cores, and lets the two share up to 128GB of memory.
Nvidia rates it at one petaflop of AI compute and says it can run a 120-billion-parameter language model on the machine itself. So if you buy one, the model runs directly from your laptop instead of from a data centre you pay a monthly fee to reach. We already covered the two N1X configurations shipping in October.
Two machines with no price
Microsoft announced both of its RTX Spark computers months ago. The Surface Laptop Ultra came on 31 May: a 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen at up to 2,000 nits, under 18mm thick, under 4.5 pounds, a replaceable SSD, up to 128GB of that shared memory.
The Surface RTX Spark Dev Box followed at Build on 2 June, a small desktop with the same chip running Windows 11 Pro set up for developers. Microsoft said both arrive “later this year” and gave no prices for either. The 7 October event is where those numbers should land.
Do not expect Windows 12. Microsoft said in May it is not happening. What is due is Windows 11 version 26H2, which reached the Release Preview channel on 27 August and installs through an enablement package. One restart flips the new features on instead of a full reinstall. It is Microsoft’s first big Windows stage show since the Copilot+ PC launch at Redmond on 20 May 2024.
What this costs in Kenya
There is no official price. Morgan Stanley puts N1X laptops at roughly USD 2,899, as we reported on 4 September. That is about KES 375,000, before duty, VAT and shipping. The Dev Box is harder: Microsoft says it will sell “in the U.S. exclusively on Microsoft.com”. Microsoft has not said which countries get the Surface Laptop Ultra.
Microsoft has now shown these two computers twice without saying what either costs or when it ships. Let’s wait for prices on 7th October. We’ll then also know whether Microsoft will be shipping them outside the United States.
Join the discussion