Razer has seen sense and slightly lowered the Razer Tax with its latest Blade 16 gaming laptops
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.
That's with largely similar specs in other ways. The new Blade 16, in either RTX 5070 Ti or RTX 5080 flavours, comes with a QHD+ 240 Hz OLED screen, 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of memory. These also come with AMD's Ryzen AI 9 365. The RTX 5090 version bumps that up to a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, with 2 TB of storage, for $4,200, though I'm not particularly convinced by that configuration just yet.
Razer hasn't budged from its premium pricing strategy in a long time, only adding more on. So why now?
This definitely feels like the doing of the ROG Zephyrus to me. It's a premium laptop design from a rival company and one that's absolutely able to go toe-to-toe with the Razer on looking and feeling lovely. It isn't quite the high performance machine as Razer's option—Asus massively restricts the power of its Zephyrus machines—but that's largely all right with me considering they're often found far cheaper than Razer's competing model. Now it's up to Asus to keep the pressure on with competitive pricing for the RTX 50-series, which haven't been announced just yet.
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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