Nvidia's RTX Spark Event in San Francisco Attracts Long Lines, But Few Buyers - PCMag
So, while the line was long, it looked like only a handful of people actually bought an RTX Spark model. Some customers told us they came merely to try out the RTX Spark before deciding whether to buy it. “I like [the RTX Spark]; I kind of want to buy one.
The Best Buy in San Francisco is no stranger to long customer lines for Nvidia products. That happened again on Friday morning when dozens of people lined up to attend the only official launch “celebration” in the US for Nvidia’s RTX Spark laptops.
PCMag was on the scene, where a line of over 100 consumers wrapped around the store and extended down the building’s side, minutes before the event kicked off at 10 a.m. The sight was reminiscent of the huge crowds for Nvidia’s RTX 3000 graphics card series back in 2021.
This time, though, the crowd wasn’t dead set on purchasing Nvidia’s products. Instead, many people came out of curiosity or because of the free "swag." That’s because the RTX Spark isn’t a graphics card, but the company’s first effort to create Windows laptops built with Nvidia’s Arm-based CPUs, making the products new and untested.
So, while the line was long, it looked like only a handful of people actually bought an RTX Spark model. The machines start at $2,599, far more than a typical laptop. Some customers told us they came merely to try out the RTX Spark before deciding whether to buy it. A few even bluntly said the laptops are too expensive, or joked that PCMag should buy them one.
“I got no money,” said George Gonzalez, a college student who drove over from San Jose, about an hour away, and arrived at about 6 a.m. He was first in line and said, “I love Nvidia. I have a special place for tech in my heart.” But while he can’t afford one 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, possibly in the future, they’ll get rid of GPUs entirely, and it’ll just be this [an RTX Spark], but it’ll run better than a GPU. It’ll be the ultimate computer,” he said.
Second in line was Kevin Barreto, who lives near the Best Buy store, and actually came 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 money,” he said with a laugh. “But it’s definitely something on my radar.”
The AI-driven memory shortage, expected to persist over the next two years or longer, is bound to keep RTX Spark pricing high in the short term. Still, the event did start off with a bang when Best Buy employees celebrated the first person to purchase an actual RTX Spark from the store. Sigil Wen, an AI developer who’s partnered with Nvidia to create AI that runs locally on a laptop, proudly held up his HP OmniBook Ultra.
“Why should I pay for my [AI] cloud subscription when I could literally just buy an RTX Spark, and it runs it super fast,” said Wen, the developer of Underdog.AI. “Basically, it’s free ChatGPT.”
“I could cancel all of my subscriptions. I don’t want to send my data to all the data centers,” he added. “I would rather it be private and personal, and on-device.”
That’s perhaps the major selling point of Nvidia’s RTX Spark. Although the laptops are pricey, they also have high-capacity memory, allowing them to run large AI models locally and privately, giving customers an alternative to OpenAI or Anthropic.
“There’s a high price on multiple Nvidia products. But for the amount of product you are getting in comparison 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 held several demo stations to show off the laptop's capabilities, including how they run games with the photorealistic graphics from DLSS 5. “It looked really cool, the NBA game,” said one attendee named Sherry. But on the price, she noted: “It’s pretty expensive. That’s why I’m looking at it and learning more about it before purchasing.”
Many also attended because Nvidia reached out to them with an email, possibly 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.
The whole crowd also seemed to linger, 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 raffle winners were announced, many attendees exited the store.
I've been a journalist for over 15 years. I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017, where I cover satellite internet services, cybersecurity, PC 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've covered the launch and explosive growth of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service, writing 600+ stories on availability and feature launches, but also the regulatory battles over the expansion of satellite constellations, fights with rival providers like AST SpaceMobile and Amazon, and the effort to expand into satellite-based mobile service. I've combed through FCC filings for the latest news and driven to remote corners of California to test Starlink's cellular service.
I also cover cyber threats, from ransomware gangs to the emergence of AI-based malware. In 2024 and 2025, the FTC forced Avast to pay consumers $16.5 million for secretly harvesting and selling their personal information to third-party clients, as revealed in my joint investigation with Motherboard.
I also cover the PC graphics card market. Pandemic-era shortages led me to camp out in front of a Best Buy to get an RTX 3000. I'm now following how the AI-driven memory shortage is impacting the entire consumer electronics market. I'm always eager to learn more, so please jump in the comments with feedback and send me tips.