In San Francisco on October 7, Microsoft gathers its partners and executives around a question that has shadowed the technology industry for years: can the promise of artificial intelligence be made real in the hands of ordinary people? The Surface Laptop Ultra and NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip represent not merely new hardware, but a second attempt to close the distance between what computing could be and what it actually delivers. After a 2024 showcase that left reviewers unconvinced and users wary, Microsoft is betting that local AI processing — intelligence that lives on the device rather than i