Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops are gunning for the MacBook Pro. Yawn
Nvidia just announced its new consumer laptop/desktop chip at Computex—RTX Spark—along with a host of partnerships from hardware manufacturers and Microsoft. It’s all anyone can talk about right now, and one of the most often-repeated lines is that Nvidia just put the MacBook Pro on notice. This is it… this is the superchip that will make Windows laptops put the nail in the MacBook Pro’s coffin.
I find the RTX Spark chip extremely interesting, and it’s definitely aiming at a market segment that overlaps the MacBook Pro, but I’m not sure it’s time for Apple to start sweating. High-performance Windows PCs exist today, and a somewhat better spin on them isn’t going to spell the end for Apple.
What is RTX Spark?
In brief, RTX Spark is a new chip made for high-performance thin and light laptops or small-form-factor desktops. It’s up to 20 ARM cores made by MediaTek (10 Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725) and an Nvidia Blackwell GPU with up to 6,144 cores, joined together with an NVLink chip-to-chip interconnect.. It can be configured with up to 128GB of LPDDR5x unified memory. It’s literally the DGX Spark AI workstation chip that Nvidia announced last spring and shipped in the fall, only optimized for laptops and consumer PCs.
In other words, it’s similar to an M5 Max, only with more GPU power.
Nvidia
It’s targeting a power draw in the 45W to 80W range, and is being launched in partnership with Microsoft, which means all the RTX Spark laptops and desktops run Windows.
What’s the big deal? Well, it should deliver a lot of performance, especially for AI tasks, for laptops in this class. It’s also an ARM CPU, not x86, and Windows on ARM has had its share of issues over the years. But this partnership with Microsoft is supposed to mean that the two companies have been working together to really smooth out those problems and provide the compatibility and performance consumers expect.
The Linux crowd is definitely not happy with this arrangement. Windows has earned a reputation for bloat, inefficiency, and instability lately, and has become bogged down with ads and data collection. The target market for these devices—creative professionals and AI enthusiasts—is fed up with Windows. Linux fans want the chip without having Windows forced on them.
Beware the marketing hype
The first products using RTX Spark aren’t expected until this fall, and we don’t have any idea what they will cost. Nvidia has a lot of “up to” in their marketing materials… “up to” 20 CPU cores, “up to” 6,144 GPU cores, “up to” 128GB of RAM. Power draw is represented as a sort of wide range, 45W is pretty low for this class of laptop and will result in good battery life, while 80W will run pretty hot and eat through battery pretty quickly.
Benchmarks are nowhere to be seen, especially on the CPU side. Nvidia is using vague language in its marketing: “Up to 2x” performance in Photoshop and Premiere, but the fine print says it’s just for specific tasks that run local AI models. Gaming is said to be up to 100 frames per second at 1440p, but without mentioning what games and settings are used.
Nvidia
The performance of the best RTX Spark configurations isn’t really in doubt. It’s the price. A DGX Spark workstation starts at around $3,500 and goes up well over $4,000, and that’s without any sort of display or battery or speakers or all the other stuff you need to put in a premium, high-price laptop for professionals. The cheapest MacBook Pro you can buy with the full-core M5 Max chip in it is $4,099, and that’s with 48GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD. More RAM can cost up to $1,000 more.
Given what’s happening in the world today with consumer tech prices, there’s little doubt that the cut-down versions of RTX Spark laptops, with fewer cores and less RAM, will cost what MacBook Pros cost, more or less.
Windows laptops with RTX Spark are set up to compete with the MacBook Pro, in other words. And they’ll arrive on the market around the same time, or slightly before, the M6 generation of Apple laptops.
Why Apple shouldn’t start sweating yet
So Nvidia and Microsoft finally have a Windows-based hardware platform that combines a big ARM CPU and big GPU together with a bunch of unified RAM in a package meant for high-end professional laptops. That’s one piece of the puzzle, but Apple needn’t worry just yet, because that’s not why people are buying MacBook Pros.
By and large, most people buy MacBooks because they want a MacBook, not because it has bigger numbers or longer benchmark bars than some Windows laptop. They want to run macOS because Windows is now an ad-laden, data-harvesting, buggy mess. They have other Apple products and want to stay in the ecosystem where everything works together seamlessly. They like the build quality, the trackpad, the keyboard.
Nvidia RTX Spark may give Windows its very own M5 Max, but it doesn’t address any of those other things, and the jury is still very much out as to whether Microsoft and all its brand partners like Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and MSI will work it all out together over the next year or so.
The real push with RTX Spark is to run AI agents. These are local-and-cloud AI models that perform tasks for you, interacting with the software and services you use to do stuff automatically or take care of boring and repetitive work. Nvidia talked about this a lot when revealing RTX Spark, and the chip does indeed seem very well suited to AI agents, especially if you pay for a lot of RAM. It’s the next big thing in AI, and both Nvidia and Microsoft are working hard to build the software frameworks and tools to totally transform your computers from a thing you run software on to a thing you tell your AI agent to run software on.
It remains to be seen if regular people actually want AI agents as the next evolution of personal computing. It’s currently the rage among tinkerers and enthusiasts who don’t mind doing a lot of configuration, troubleshooting, and dealing with questionable results. The reliability, ease of use, utility, and cost that would make it everyday tech for your average person seem a long way off.
The threat to Apple doesn’t come from a more competitive system-on-chip for Windows laptops, it comes from the prospect that Microsoft might get its act together with Windows. It comes from the possibility that personal computing really will evolve into a “AI first” ecosystem and that Macs won’t have the necessary hardware or software to provide that for consumers.
