The best reason to care about Nvidia’s RTX Spark: ‘everything’ will run on Arm

Fourteen years ago this month, Microsoft put out an Nvidia-powered Windows PC that turned into one of the company’s ugliest write-downs. The original Surface ran a stripped-down Windows on an Nvidia Tegra chip, and the big problem was simple: it couldn’t run the Windows apps people already had. Buyers were asked to give up their old software. They didn’t bite, and Microsoft ended up writing off $900 million in inventory.

Now Nvidia is back in the center of another wave of Arm-based Windows laptops. On Friday, October 16th, the first RTX Spark machines arrive, this time from Asus. And Nvidia’s pitch is basically the opposite of the Surface RT era: these laptops will run everything.

That “everything” is the real headline here. The source specifically calls out Adobe and Office, the kind of software that makes or breaks a Windows machine for a lot of people. If that claim holds, it removes the old excuse that Arm PCs are a neat side project for enthusiasts and nobody else.

So the story is less about a chip than about compatibility. Nvidia has been here before, but this time the company is selling continuity instead of compromise. That is a much better place to start from.