Surface Laptop Ultra ships October 16 at $2,599. The MacBook trade-in bonus is real, and it arrives after Microsoft inspects your old Mac.
Microsoft put a banner on the Surface Laptop Ultra page this week that tells you to break up with your MacBook. The offer underneath it is up to $1,000 cash back if you buy the Ultra and trade in a MacBook Pro. Preorders opened October 7. Shipping starts Friday, October 16.
The laptop itself is a 15-inch machine on Nvidia’s RTX Spark platform, with an N1X CPU, an RTX GPU and up to 128 GB of unified memory. The base model has 24 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD for $2,599.99. The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,999, so Microsoft is $400 under Apple’s entry price, and it has made sure every headline says so.
What the $1,000 is
The cash back is a bonus on top of the trade-in value, paid after an inspection by Teladvance, Microsoft’s trade-in partner. The amount depends on which MacBook you send and what condition it is in. The machine has to power on, hold a charge and work. You mail it in within 15 days of filing the online claim. The promotion runs through November 23 in the US and Canada.
So it is not a $1,000 discount at checkout. Windows Central ran the numbers on the trade-in calculator and got a top quote of $2,115 for a 2025 16-inch MacBook Pro with 128 GB of RAM and 4 TB of storage. Add the bonus and someone with a maxed-out Mac in excellent condition could come out well ahead. Someone with a base 14-inch from two years ago will not.
Where the price comparison gets thinner
The $2,599 price buys 24 GB and 512 GB. Move to 1 TB and iClarified puts the Surface at $2,999.99, which is within a dollar of a 16-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro with the same memory and storage. The gap Microsoft is advertising mostly lives at the entry configuration.
A few other numbers from the spec sheets:
- Display: 15-inch mini-LED touchscreen, 262 ppi, up to 120 Hz, 2,000 nits peak HDR. The 16-inch MacBook Pro is 254 ppi and 1,600 nits peak.
- Weight and thickness: under 4.5 lb and under 18 mm. The 16-inch MacBook Pro is 4.7 lb and 16.8 mm.
- Ports: USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, SD card reader and a magnetic USB-C charging connector Microsoft calls Magnetic Connect.
- It runs Windows 11 on Arm.
The part nobody can price yet
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has said Apple will show a thinner, lighter MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen this fall, possibly at an event the week of October 26. If that lands, the Surface Laptop Ultra will have spent about ten days as the only touchscreen laptop in this price bracket from a company people compare to Apple. Microsoft knows this, which is why the preorder window and the trade-in campaign both opened before Apple’s event.
If you are deciding this month, the practical move is to run your own MacBook through Microsoft’s trade-in calculator before you believe the $1,000 number, and to wait for Apple’s late-October event before you send anything in the mail.