Razer Taking Pre-Orders for Blade Gaming Laptop Within Days

Oh! and I thought that TH readership believed Apple customers were mugs

Nice but very expensive.

I would like to see the bill of materials for this product. Maybe there is a reasonable explanation for the price tag (other than unbelievable greed).

@Cumulonimbus incus, this is a specialty/niche laptop, that's why it's so expensive. It's aimed at a very specific market that is willing to pay top dollar for top performance, unlike Apple, where all of their products, from top of the line to the bottom are over-priced. That's why so many reader's consider Apple customers "mugs".

Well for starters the chassis is milled. Then there's the second screen with the Switchblade UI. This laptop isn't expensive because of the components, it's expensive because of the amount of engineering that went in to it.

I've paid over $2000 for a top gaming laptop and yes, you get what you pay for. I had better benchmark scores than most desktops just a few months old. I don't need that kind of performance anymore since I'm not traveling as much as I used to but... if you like to game but your job keeps you on the go, this is a great product assuming you can afford it.

Drop the price about $800 and get rid of that crappy gt 555m and put in a gtx 560m and think we have winner.

You know, the desire to make a profit on something is not a bad thing. The desire to make money is why 99% of businesses are *GASP* IN BUSINESS. They don't exist to provide people with jobs and benefits, that is merely a pleasant side effect. All of the cool technology and games that we enjoy exist because someone or a group of someones have a desire to make a pile of money. The flipside to that... and try to understand this because it is very important... you are NOT required to purchase an extremely expensive laptop. If you deem it of value to you, then you will buy it. If you don't, then you won't.

I couldn't imagine spending that much on any computer.

^ and than you have torrents to keep some happily away from gamepublishers...i mean daylight robbers j/k

I can, but first i imagine winning the lottery.

Does anyone realize the powerhouse of a laptop you could get with $2800 dollars. Yeah it'll be a big laptop but who plays games on there lap. No one, your gonna have it on a table or something with a mouse. Don't get me wrong the design and lcd touchpad and buttons on the side are cool as hell. But the hardware in this thing doesn't excuse the price of it.

LOL "we've decided to to upgrade the 320 GB hard drive to a 256 SSD". Giving me LESS storage space is by no means an "upgrade" even f the drive is faster.

"dual-core Intel Core i7 CPU clocked at 2.8 GHz (3.5 GHz Turbo)"

shouldn't Razer put in quad-core i7 if they want to tout performance as a gaming laptop?

The price is not that outrageous. The better chassis and touchpad-gimmick are probably worth the $500 you pay more compared to a equivalent Alienware, Asus or whatever. Weight and battery life also matter.

I still don't understand the appeal of gaming laptops though. Do all those graphics details really matter on a 15-17"laptop display?

Makes way more sense now that they put an i7 in it. Back when they first announced it would have an intel atom processor, there was no way it was going to be a gaming laptop.

What does an under-tuned 550 ti need 2gb of memory for? Marketing gimmick if I ever saw one...

the only place that you get screwed more than an apple product, is a gaming product, slightly behind that, sound.

apple sells its crap to morons who believe the "it just works" line, and the lifestyle appeal they give. back in the pre xpsp1 era, macs did work more often than pcs, at least in my experience, still hated them though. but now... not so much, but people still believe that line of crap.

but gaming... its like they assume everyone who plays games is retarded and will pay 100+ for something that is only worth 20$ because it has gaming attached to it. i have a razor naga, got it referb for 50$ and its the one thing that i ever used that was labeled gaming i didn't feel screwed on, 12 easy to hit buttons can get a hell of allot done, fast.

How Come Razer is not sue'in Motorola droide "razer" for the same name? ref. patent No. xxxxxx

Here's something for you to do. Go to www.cyberpowerpc.com or ibuypower.com and built a laptop for $2800 dollars. Comment back on this and tells the specs on it. I guarantee you the hardware on the laptop you built will blow this laptop away.

People simply don't understand the performance of this laptop. It's not an ultra high performance piece of kit at all. It's on par with $900 gaming laptops and has roughly the same gaming performance as an Apple Macbook Pro (Low end i7 and HD6770M) but less portable, no optical drive, crippled storage and at a premium over the Apple offering.

The 555M is has very poor performance.

By Razer's own definition, the Macbook Pro is more of "the worlds first gaming laptop" than the blade.

Motorola Razr

To put it in the most simple terms possible:

1. This laptop will not run 2011 released games such as Battlefield 3, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, etc in it's native resolution at anything above the lowest settings at a playable framerate.

2. This laptop has roughly the same gaming performance as a current Macbook, yet is priced considerably higher.

Gaming laptop is an oxymoron. You can buy 3 gaming desktops for that money and they will outperform it.

This wasn't meant for "joe nate"
re-posting to clarify

Here's something for you to do. Go to www.cyberpowerpc.com or www.ibuypower.com and built a laptop for $2800 dollars. Comment back on this and tells the specs on it. I guarantee you the hardware on the laptop you built will blow this laptop away.

That laptop is neat looking, but I would rather go with a somewhat bulkier laptop with far better specs for the same price than with that. But yeah, it is not overpriced in the same way as Apple's products are, as pointed out by max-power.

They should have negotiated better graphics if this is to be a legitimate gaming laptop, a GT555M? Bitch please...

I wonder how they plan to dissipate all that heat from the i7 processor... I love my m14x but even that heats up like crazy...

Play a game like AION on this Razer laptop, and your fingers are going to cook like sausages...

lol it hilarious to see the razer fanboys defending this product to death even though they hate apple.

This product will suck as a gaming laptop. It only has a 555m.
This product will get beat by a MacBook Pro in most newer games, due to the MBP's quad core.

You can configure a 17" MBP with an SSD, quad 2.4, and 6770M for the same price, and I'd rather have a multitouch trackpad with dozens of natural gestures, then a gimicky touch screen beside my keyboard.

If you want to pay this much for gaming go get an Alienware M14x which will tie it in performance for roughly $1500 less. Or spend the same money, and get an M18x with SLI 580M's and a way better CPU

Waste of money. Someone said this is what ASUS charges, they are wrong. Not close.

How can anyone put a 550m in something that costs $2700 with a straight face?

A gaming laptop must at least be reasonably portable and be able to play games on the market at the time of it's release on high graphics settings. Razer got the first part right, but the gaming fire-power falls short.

The thing that excites me about this is that finally a laptop manufacturer not named after fruit is producing a proper unibody chassis (assuming they got it right). To me, this is Apple's only actual quality advantage over the competition.

Lastly, tight package portable laptops however are tough to make as gaming devices of any kind of high caliber. Not only because of the difficulty of fitting and cooling powerful hardware, but also because the available GPUs in a premium gaming laptop must always include the latest and greatest, and in a very tight chassis, that kind of frequent hardware update is hard to do.

I wonder if Sony might be on to something with their power media dock concept. If you could have a gaming laptop with a decent on-board gpu for running games at moderate quality while on the go, but also have the ability to connect to an external GPU for the proper high performance that a gamer expects when playing at home. Obviously there are some technical challenges to this kind of approach, but I bet that it would be very possible.

Otherwise, It isn't so bad to just keep the desktop for modern games and if I have to use my laptop for any games, I'll stick to some retro titles.