San Francisco’s Best Buy is no stranger to long customer lines for Nvidia products. It happened again Friday morning when dozens of people lined up to attend the only official “celebration” of the U.S. launch of Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops.
PCMag was on hand, where a line of more than 100 consumers wrapped around the store and stretched down the side of the building, minutes before the event kicked off at 10 a.m. The sight was reminiscent of the huge crowds for Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series of graphics cards in 2021.
(Credit: PCMag/Michael Kan)
This time, however, the crowd wasn’t determined to buy Nvidia products. Instead, many people came out of curiosity or because of the free “gift.” Indeed, the RTX Spark is not a graphics card, but the company’s first effort to create Windows laptops built with Nvidia’s Arm processors, making the products new and untested.
So even though the queue was long, it seemed like only a handful of people were purchasing an RTX Spark model. The machines start at $2,599, much more than a typical laptop. Some customers told us that they simply came to try the RTX Spark before deciding to purchase it. Some even outright said laptops were too expensive, or joked that PCMag should buy them one.
“I didn’t have any money,” said George Gonzalez, a student who drove from San Jose, about an hour’s drive, and arrived around 6 a.m. He was first in line and said, “I love Nvidia. I have a special place for technology in my heart.” But even though he can’t afford it right now, Gonzalez took a longer-term view, saying he hopes the company will one day create a more affordable RTX Spark laptop that can also run Linux rather than Windows.
“Maybe one day, maybe in the future, they’ll get rid of GPUs altogether, and it will just be that (an RTX Spark), but it will perform better than a GPU. It will be the ultimate computer,” he said.
(Credit: PCMag/Michael Kan)
Kevin Barreto, who lives near the Best Buy store, came second to meet YouTuber iJustine, who was greeting fans at the event. “I like (the RTX Spark); I kind of want to buy one. But I’m not going to buy one today because of the money,” he said with a laugh. “But it’s definitely something on my radar.”
The AI-driven memory shortage, which is expected to persist for the next two years or more, is bound to keep RTX Spark prices high in the near term. Still, the event started off with a bang as Best Buy employees celebrated the first person to purchase a real RTX Spark from the store. Sigil Wen, an AI developer who partnered with Nvidia to create AI that runs locally on a laptop, proudly holds up his HP OmniBook Ultra.
“Why would I pay for my (AI) cloud subscription when I could literally buy an RTX Spark, and it runs it really fast,” said Wen, the developer of Underdog.AI. “Basically, it’s free ChatGPT.”
“I could cancel all my subscriptions. I don’t want to send my data to all the data centers,” he added. “I would prefer it to be private and personal, and on the device.”
This is perhaps the biggest selling point of Nvidia’s RTX Spark. Although the laptops are expensive, they also have high-capacity memory, allowing them to run large AI models locally and privately, giving customers an alternative to OpenAI or Anthropic.
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“Several Nvidia products are priced high. But for the amount of product you get compared to anything else on the market, I think it’s fair for what it is,” said another interested customer named George T, who already owns an Nvidia RTX 5080 GPU.
At the event, Nvidia set up several demo stations to show off the laptop’s capabilities, including how they run games with the photorealistic graphics of DLSS 5. “It looked really cool, the NBA game,” said an attendee named Sherry. But regarding the price, she noted, “It’s quite expensive. That’s why I’m looking into it and learning more about it before I buy it.”
Many also participated because Nvidia contacted them via email, perhaps because they had signed up to receive marketing emails from the company. Meanwhile, one woman told us she was there because her husband, a computer scientist, was interested in the product.
One of the signed laptops. (Credit: PCMag/Michael Kan)
The entire crowd seemed to linger as well, hoping to win a free RTX Spark laptop signed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. At one point, Huang briefly appeared on a smartphone at the event. But once the five winners of the drawing were announced, many participants left the store.
NVIDIA RTX SPARK Launch Celebration at Best Buy in San Francisco
About our expert
Michael Kan
Senior reporter
Experience
I have been a journalist for over 15 years. I got my start as a Kansas City schools and towns reporter and joined PCMag in 2017, where I cover satellite internet services, cybersecurity, computer hardware and more. I’m currently based in San Francisco, but previously spent over five years in China, covering the country’s technology sector.
Since 2020, I have covered the launch and explosive growth of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service, writing more than 600 articles on feature availability and launches, but also regulatory battles over expanding satellite constellations, struggles with rival providers like AST SpaceMobile and Amazon, and efforts to expand into mobile satellite service. I scoured FCC filings for the latest news and traveled to remote corners of California to test Starlink’s cellular service.
I also cover cyber threats, from ransomware gangs to the emergence of AI-driven malware. In 2024 and 2025, the FTC forced Avast to pay consumers $16.5 million for secretly collecting and selling their personal information to third-party customers, my joint report reveals. investigation with motherboard.
I also cover the PC graphics card market. Pandemic-era shortages led me to camp out outside a Best Buy to get an RTX 3000. I’m now tracking the impact of the AI-driven memory shortage on the entire consumer electronics market. I’m always keen to learn more, so please share your feedback and send me tips.
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