ranzware
There have been multiple reports going around about Razer pausing direct sales of its gaming laptops in the US and that kinda is/isn’t exactly the case. We’re in a Switch 2 situation here, people, where pre-orders for the new laptops are toast as all the Razer machines are currently out of stock in the territory and anything fresh coming in will be subject to the definitely-a-good-idea tariffs.
The Razer Blade 16 is sold out with all the initial product run sold through, and instead of a buy button on the Razer US store there is nothing but a ‘Notify me’ button asking for email confirmation of when stock returns. To be clear, that’s the same situation as I find myself in over here in the UK.
The lovely Blade 16, my pick as the best gaming laptop around today… isn’t around anymore. It’s out of stock here, again with a ‘Notify me’ button all a hungry shopper in the UK has to click on.
What’s different between these two situations is that over here I can at least see the pseudo laptop configurator (in reality you cannot configure a Blade, just choose which of a small set of configs you want) and there is a specific price on the page as to what you will pay when your chosen machine eventually comes back into stock.
In the US, this individual product page just 404s. That’s internet speak for ‘it gone’.
You can still see the main Blade 16 info page, but there is now nothing to indicate what the dollar price of the Blade 16 might be. It’s the same for the big boi Blade 18, too, which is available for pre-orders in the UK. We noticed this last week when Andy was pitting the new Razer lappy against Asus’ latest Zephyrus G16 and we where double-checking price.
We, too, got a strict “we have no comment to make at this time” from Razer when we questioned it about the tariffs and about what was happening around the pages coming down. But I don’t think we need a Razer expert to see what actually is happening—the pages with pricing on have vanished specifically in the US, where there are brand new tariffs being dropped on a ton of territories around the world for products coming into the country. Tariffs which will affect pricing.
I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb to suggest that Razer taking down a specific pricing page for a product means you should probably expect that when that page does come back up the pricing is going to look very different. Maybe not to the five-figure tune Jeremy fears for future US-built Blades, but it’s not unreasonable to expect that Razer will have to adjust pricing up for new machines coming into the US and that’s why you can no longer see them.
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Which is a shame but not unexpected. After all, Razer said the Blade was going to be “aggressively priced” in this generation to counter the way Asus had gone directly after it with the previous Zephyrus G16 and G14 laptops. That means it will have likely cut margins in order to lower the price, and with a ton of tariffs in effect across its manufacturing and supply chain those margins are going to be cut into ever more.
And I don’t think Razer is going to swallow that itself, instead passing that onto the end users. As is the way with most tariffs, you have to “take your medicine” though whether this does “fix” anything in the US is still up in the air and very much up for debate.
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Kurt Indovina
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