The entire concept of the Blade represents a compromise
The entire concept of Razer’s Blade series represents a compromise, too: it’s a gaming laptop that’s much smaller and more portable than almost any other PC gaming machine, but that comes at the sacrifice of the long-term upgradability that a desktop or even a bulkier laptop provides. Like Microsoft’s Surfaces or Apple’s MacBooks, the Blade is a closed machine — even the RAM is soldered down, and you’ll void your warranty just by cracking open the case. So whatever specs you buy it with are what you’ll be stuck with forever. Fortunately, the newly upgraded Blade packs some serious specs that should carry it for a couple of years.
Visually, the Blade is virtually identical to last year’s model. Changes are found instead on the inside, where Razer has upgraded the processor to an Intel Core i7-7700HQ from the latest Kaby Lake generation (clocked at 2.8GHz, with a boost up to 3.8GHz). The Blade also has Nvidia’s new GTX 1060 GPU with 6GB of memory, a speedy PCIe M.2 SSD (available in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB sizes), and 16GB of RAM. If you were building a gaming laptop from scratch today, it’d be hard to come up with better specs for the needs of most people, which helps with the fact that nothing is upgradable after the fact in this machine.
The Razer Blade is almost like the MacBook Pro that Apple should have made
In a lot of ways, the Razer Blade is almost like the MacBook Pro that Apple should have made: the latest powerful hardware, both USB 3.0 ports and a USB-C jack, an HDMI port, and a proper black color, rather than the slate gray Touch Bar models. And it supports VR, which no Apple machine, laptop or desktop, is certified for (although the Blade still can’t charge over USB-C, using a legacy barrel port to actually charge the battery).
The rest of the hardware is essentially taken wholesale from the old model. The chassis is a gorgeous, deep black aluminum that almost instantly became coated with dozens of fingerprints as soon as I took it out of the box. But aside from the company’s signature glowing green snake logo on the lid, the Blade continues to be a welcome breath of elegant and restrained design in a gaming PC market that all too often focuses on “edgy” plastic protrusions and angular vents.