Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops launched in the US on Friday at a single Best Buy in San Francisco — and while over 100 people queued before 10 a.m., only a handful walked out with one. The RTX Spark isn’t a GPU. It’s Nvidia’s first line of Windows laptops built around its own Arm-based CPUs, designed to run large AI models locally, no cloud subscription required.
Starting at $2,599, they’re priced well above mainstream ultrabooks and even most high-end gaming rigs. In India, HP’s OmniBook Ultra. The first RTX Spark model confirmed for sale, is listed at ₹2,49,999. No other RTX Spark models or regional pricing were disclosed in the reporting.
The OmniBook Ultra was the only unit sold on-site during the event, purchased by AI developer Sigil Wen, co-creator of Underdog.AI. He called it “free ChatGPT”. A reference to cutting cloud AI subscriptions by running models like Llama 3.2 90B or Gemma 3 directly on-device. That privacy-and-performance pitch is central: the laptops pack high-bandwidth memory (HBM3, per earlier leaks) to handle inference workloads that would otherwise demand data center access.
But price remains the barrier. College student George Gonzalez, first in line, drove from San Jose at 6 a.m. Just to see the device, then said flatly, “I got no money.” Others echoed him. Kevin Barreto, second in line, laughed when asked if he’d buy one: “Not today. But it’s definitely something on my radar.” The event wasn’t a retail launch so much as a controlled debut: demo stations showed DLSS 5-powered NBA gameplay, raffle winners got signed units, and Jensen Huang made a brief cameo via smartphone screen.
No broader availability date was announced. No other retailers, no pre-orders outside HP’s site, no mention of OEM partners beyond HP. What is clear: this is Nvidia’s bet that developers and privacy-conscious AI users will pay a steep premium for on-device autonomy. Even if the rest of the market waits for the price to fall, or for Linux support to arrive.
HP says the OmniBook Ultra ships globally starting November 1. No Indian shipping date was given.
CDFiled by The Computing Desk
Laptops, desktops, processors, graphics cards and the operating systems that run on them.
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