The New Razer Blade | Hacker News Reader

The New Razer Blade

razerzone.com

I feel quite old and stupid that I clicked on this expecting shave technology.

I'm only 22 and I clicked hoping for better shaving cream tech. Even though I'm not a hairy person shaving is such a pain.

I assumed that's what it was too.

If that's what you're looking for, though, Bevel[0] was just launched.

(I used to get terrible razor burn - switching to a double edge razor has made a huge difference. Bevel didn't invent the concept, obviously, but they do make it very convenient.).

[0] https://getbevel.com/

er, what exactly did they do to make it "very convenient"?

Their shaver looks very similar to a Merkur Futur [0], which has existed for ages and isn't considered by many to be the best safety razor. The cost for the razor is fair at $60, but they want to extract $30 a month afterwards! Insane! Their lineup consists of a priming oil, badger hair brush, shaving cream and aftershave balm. None of this is out of the ordinary for well equipped wet shavers, and costs nowhere near $30 a month to supply.

Oh well, if it's worth it to someone to subscribe and forget, what do I care. I would rather keep the money in my pocket. You only need to order wet shaving supplies perhaps once a year anyway, even less if you know what you like and stock up.

Notice the bullshit copy on their website: they conveniently leave standard single blade double edge razors out of their comparison matrix so that only the Bevel Razor gets the 6/6 checkmarks.

[0] http://www.shaving101.com/index.php/product-reviews/safety-r...

I thought it was going to be a scooter.

Does nearly every laptop these days look like a Mac Book Pro? Once in a while I see things like the Yoga, but from the radius of the rounded corners, indents for opening the lid, shape/size of the keyboard keys, placement of inputs... They might as well have spray painted the MBP black and called it a night. Maybe they did...

It's nuts. Every laptop I see now is a plastic MacBook knockoff, and this is no exception.

What makes it a Macbook knock off? Chiclet keyboard? Sony's VAIO X505 did it first. What else? Smooth, rounded corners? (lol)

After you've thinned down and chipped away as much as you can from any laptop design, that's pretty much what you get.

Then you have those people that go "NO NO NO It's totally different" ... except it's obvious. It's annoying, laptops use to be very different one from another.

This is actually a very very interesting laptop where my only question is: Will it run Linux without too much trouble?

I have a Lenovo W530, but I have an inkling that the future of the Thinkpad is very grim for my work use cases. Laptops like the Razer Blade would be my next potential go-to if it can run Linux without much fuss.

I'm also hoping this has good Linux support when it comes time to replace my X1 Carbon at the end of the year as based on the recently updated model I also don't hold out much hope for the future of the Thinkpad.

What has you feeling down on Thinkpads?

The new trackpads. The one of the reasons I've liked Thinkpads is the two solid mechanical buttons, plus the 3rd button in the middle. The latest model replaced those with the integrated trackpad.

The old X1 Carbon apart from the display is nearly the perfect Linux Laptop. All they had to do was upgrade the display to HiDPI and it would have been perfect.

That's disappointing to hear! I've been on Macs for a while, and figured I'd go to Thinkpads if I ever switched away.

How so? http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/w-series/w540/

I really like my MBP, solid fast machine. It only has 16GB and I would like a machine with at least 32 if not 64. I am a little jealous of a W530/W540 owner. You can have RAID SSD and 32GB of ram. Coupled with VMWare Workstation ... swoon!

Right, I've seen the W540 as well, but I guess I'm thinking longer term since my previous laptop, the T61, was used for 5 or so years. In that time, I'm not too confident about Lenovo's workstation plans...

> I am a little jealous of a W530/W540 owner. You can have RAID SSD and 32GB of ram.

There's also an available mSATA slot. I have 3 SSDs on mine, but I think I went too far.

You did not. Use all available resources I say! In my MBP I have 1 TB SSD and a 1TB rotational drive (replaced the DVD drive) for backups (runs an rsync every hour ssd->platter). When the reliability is proven I will run dual 1TB SSD and rsync to a networked machine. My Samsung 840 EVO has been stellar. You don't need Hadoop when you have fast disks.

What are you doing on a laptop that could possibly require 64GB of memory.

Most of the specs look great, but like most made-for-Windows-8 laptops on the market there is a fixed limitation of 8GB of RAM.

Its 2014. I want 32GB of RAM as an option, and 16 GB minimum.

I am still looking for a great Linux development laptop but this is not it.

16GB minimum is still a little silly. My desktop has 16GB, kind of on accident, and my machine literally has no idea what to do with so much RAM. Most of the time it spends 8-10GB on disk cache.

There are absolutely use cases for more. I would love to have my home machine at my desk at work, for example, for EDA tools. But that's why you make 16GB (or even 32GB) an option.

No way. Everything with a keyboard should probably ship with 16GB. My dev server has 128GB, my laptop has 16, 4GB is a toy and 8GB is the minimum for useful work. This laptop looks pretty good, but compared to a W540 which can have dual sata and 32GB I would have to pass.

My next desktop will have 64GB which is not extreme in the least. The worst trend that I don't see being fixed is the lack of ECC memory. ALL MEMORY SHOULD BE ECC!!!1! Lack of ECC is like running an open loop feedback mechanism. no good can come of it. No ECC and terabyte filesystems, recipe for horrible unrecoverable disaster.

> 8GB is the minimum for useful work

I can do a hell of a lot of useful work with far less than that

Every once in a while, I have a wistful desire to take a notebook with a modern high-capacity battery, pull out everything except those batteries, and slap in an e-ink display, a single flash card for storage, and something less powerful than a Raspberry Pi for processing. And then write just enough operating system for it to boot to Emacs.

That, in my mind, would be a programmer's computer. (Or a writer's computer.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

I actually had one of these, http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sacat=0&_from=R40&_nkw=alpha... but the first edition that ran off of AA which looks a little rare (good thing because the keyboard started to stick, oh and dump the contents as everything is stored in RAM).

> My dev server has 128GB

...when you say 'dev server', is that a computer in your home/office, or something hosted somewhere? And, if it's hosted--who are you using for hosting that makes 128GB-memory machines available cheaply enough that it's at-all-sensible to use one for a dev server?

It is a used machine hosted at a friends colo.

For something similar http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sun-SunFire-X4600-M2-8x-AMD-Opteron-...

The only reason to use hosting providers is to provide instant provisioning/scaling. Otherwise, money burned. Colo space is fairly cheap, so are old but still totally serviceable bad-ass machines.

Is that ad for real? Seems to good to be true? What is the catch?

Sounds like a jet? Hardly any ram? Crappy drives? You can't just put any old hardware in these things.

> Colo space is fairly cheap

I'm not sure you have the same definition of "cheap" as I do. $5/mo for a 1GB DigitalOcean droplet is cheap.

Buying old-but-badass hardware seems to be similarly cost-effective for that purpose (if that link is to be believed), but where (other than "a friend in ops") can you get 1U/2U of colo hosting for anywhere near that price?

I guess, if you're talking about the marginal price of an extra 1U/2U on top of your existing production rack, it can be negligible. For non-business-affiliated goofing-around, though?

I mean actual colo space, like you just pay for 4u, 8u, bandwidth and power. No machines, just space.

Both are "cheap" just along different axis.

Right, that's the same thing I was talking about. But again, how is paying for 4u/8u of space at all "cheap", when all you want to stick in it is your own 1u junk server?

But I don't want to stick my own 1u junk server (although I do have those, 4 cores, 8gb). The low end SSD back VPS are phenomenal for what you get.

"8GB is the minimum for useful work..."

What are...just...what are you doing for work?

You don't need it, until you do. Several developer tools I use regularly eat up that memory like nothing when you run in certain modes.

Development shouldn't feel like working on an airplane tray table.

Eh, I never do "real work" directly on a laptop anyway. For me, "real work" happens on a compute farm by necessity.

As a laptop focused on gaming on the go, 16GB is overkill. No games will make use of that.

Razer needs to do the right thing and make Blades that are less gamer-friendly and more business-friendly. If you can tame the battery life with a more sane graphics card, you could give Apple a serious run for its money.

I would say Apple is more artist friendly than business friendly, and that's a perfect place for these high end Razor Blade machines to give them a run for.

I think GP was referring to how are Macs are engineer-friendly, since they run *nix and work well with Linux.

They run (an old version of) the FreeBSD userland, but I would hesitate to say that the "work well with Linux".

It's tolerable, but it's hardly a stellar experience. Things like suspend/hibernate, fan control, etc. are problematic, even though they're fine on most other pieces of hardware on the market.

I always sigh a bit when I hear people recommending installing Linux on a Macbook, because they're not getting the full experience - they end up thinking that Linux is buggy and doesn't support these functionalities well, when the truth is that it does, as long as you use hardware that is actually supported.

There are a number of reasons that Apple hardware will probably always be a sub-optimal platform for Linux. There was a HN comment a while back from one of the Linux kernel developers responsible for maintaining the MPB drivers who explained why this is the case, though I can't find it.

I don't think he means by "works well with Linux" that macs actually run Linux even ok. Which is clearly not the case, a mac running linux is waaay shittier than say a Lenovo W540 running Linux.

Running Linux on a Mac is not a good idea. Just getting it to boot is a 4hr plus long endeavor. Best to run Linux in a VM on your mac. Windows on Mac is a better idea than Linux.

I think by "works well with Linux" in that it has a bash shell, has Homebrew, etc.

No, I was under the (mistaken) impression that Linux on Mac is fine. It's not. Sorry about that.

No problem. I thought that as well until I had to boot linux on my mac for an SSD upgrade.

Witness the help pages organized by specific MBP version: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro yes, it is that complex.

These seem to fit your description pretty well: http://www.asus.com/zenbook/ .

Nice laptop, but unusable website. It takes 3+ seconds to at least see something, and the scrolling effect makes everything seem so slow. There is an obvious memory leak somewhere, the graphs in devtools are INSANE for such a simple site, take a look http://imgur.com/j13Xk6h

They are loading like 20 jQuery libraries in the header. Nothing is minified. By looking at the JS code here http://assets.razerzone.com/eeimages/products/15348/js/templ..., it seems like they vomited jQuery on top of a PSD2HTML site. Bad indentation, bad class names like ".bar-prc1", ".bar-prc2", ".bar-prc3", no selector caching, no consitent usage of chaining, inconsistent style overall, in other words, a mess.

For me, the most important selling point of a laptop has become how good the keyboard is. Usually, that starts with an evaluation of its shittiness. Hires version of the keyboard: http://assets.razerzone.com/eeimages/razer_pages/16039/razer...

- Has delete key in usable position. Good.

- Ctrl is in the bottom left corner. Good.

- Right Meta key is Fn. Bad.

- No Home/End/PgUp/PgDown keys. No-go. Next!

I feel like I am probably pretty alone in this. But I have really been hoping that they would update the razer edge pro line.

I have a surface pro 2 for work that I really like and having something close to that that could do high performance gaming has basically been a dream of mine since forever.

Sadly what they have shared on their forums seems to reflect that they don't want to do, or can't make work another edge despite its pretty wide popularity.

I really like the specs and looks of this. Trouble is, I really don't need another computer in my life. I've already got four desktops, and three tablets, one of which is a Surface Pro.

But, that screen and those specs are very appealing.

Plus, as someone who was just short of addicted—okay, addicted—to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I did not know there was a new Wolfenstein game coming up. Also excited to find out more about that.

Looks beautiful. How long does it run on battery? The specs are nice, but if you can't really be mobile you may as well get a desktop.

Even if you have to plug it in, a laptop is still far more portable than a desktop. If you're moving about and working in different areas, but still have access to power then a laptop could still be a better solution.

An iMac is portable, a Macbook is mobile. I'm hoping this is mobile, but knowing the PC laptop world my guess is <2hours of battery under serious use.

My question is will this need to be tethered to a power outlet to use? Is the battery just so your machine doesn't shut off while moving from room to room?

Personally MacBooks have a good battery but I'm _still_ debating buying an external battery to keep that running longer. I wonder if you could modify the HyperShop batteries to work with PC laptops...

They're claiming 6hrs of "productivity" and 2-3 hours of gaming, which is about what I get with a less powerful 13" retina MacBook Pro. Granted, this is also 1000 dollars more expensive.

from your post I would guess that you have not experienced the joy of intel haswell based laptops my laptop lasts 7 hours or more on a charge when in power-saver mode. There is nothing special about it besides the fact that it is current.

You are going to have alot of fun the next time you get a new machine!

So, with this and the Lenovo Yoga Pro both having QHD panels, I'm hoping there's a lot more in this vein coming down the pipe.

Still 16:9 though for some unfathomable reason.

Page design made me dizzy.

But seriously, I really wouldn't mind if laptops were a centimeter or two thicker and the battery held far more than 2 hours on heavy usage. My backpack designed for laptops could easily carry two or three, so that is not a problem, and when the laptop is in use, the extra thickness doesn't really matter.

I just don't see why this craze for thinness.

I would say it's so you can have a laptop on you in situations where you weren't specifically planning to bring it with you, just because it's light enough to forget you have it.

How hot will this thing get when gaming? Can it be used for prolonged sessions when playing graphics intensive games on high settings (like Titanfall)?

I have an Alienware M17x and that sucker will burn you if you have it on your lap.

Beyond that, it is prone to overheating when placed on a flat surface and I had to usually put some sort of spacer underneath to give it better airflow.

Oooh, this looks really nice. I'm so happy that high-pixel density screens are becoming available. It's about time.

But with a built-in battery...ahh, almost had me. Sticking to Thinkpads. I'd gladly sacrifice some thinness to be able to replace worn-out batteries or use multiple batteries on the go.

I cannot wait for this style of website scrolling to die. It was neat as a proof of concept, but as a way of actually presenting information, it's ridiculous.

I want to be able to read some information and see some pictures. I don't need that to try to be a futuristic experience.

Get off my lawn!

No power button next to backspace? Has a delete key? Shut up an take my money!

Interesting how it's so thin and yet not really that light.

Lead, for solid smooooth heft.

This is a black Macbook Pro.

With a much more powerful grahpics card

is it wrong that I want one for the screen, but to run OSX so I can write code?

I don't game on a laptop.

What about dual booting or using Virtual Box and installing your favorite Linux flavor?

Having done the Windows 7 & archlinux dual boot dance for many years before getting a MBP, I can say I don't want to go back to that :(.

Hackintosh is close enough, but if there isn't support for the hardware I would rather try wiping off windows and putting arch/freebsd on there.

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