Razer is the 'MacBook' for gaming laptops. That's what 'they' say. 'They' probably being Razer employees diving deep into peoples' dreams to plant the concept at the core of their very being, but also plenty of other people to be fair. They really are lovely devices. Though much like Apple, Razer hasn't been afraid to charge over the odds for one. The so-called 'Razer Tax' has whacked a solid four-digit premium on its laptops versus other similarly specced machines, though that is coming down a little with the incoming generation.
The new Razer Blade 16 will be priced at $2,800, with an RTX 5070 Ti, or $3,200 with an RTX 5080. That seems like a lot of money, and it is, but compare the latter with the RTX 4080 model we reviewed last year and it's $400 cheaper. That 2024 version was $3,600, for mostly the same sorta stuff, and the RTX 4070 model was $3,000, which is more than the Ti version this time around.
We knew this price adjustment was coming. Back at CES, when I got to see the Blade 16 in person for the first time, we were told it was "aggressively priced". It's also pretty aggressively slimmed down, with the removable memory DIMMs cut to make way for slimmer soldered memory. It's 30% smaller by volume as a result, and darn did it feel that way when I was holding it in my hands. That was one of my complaints with the previous year's Blades: they were chunky as heck.
So, is the world healing now that Razer has dropped its prices a touch? No, not entirely. Though it's good to see some competition in the high-end laptop market shaking up prices, even a little. Things do change; not everything stays the same.
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