Razer Pauses Direct Laptop Sales in the US as New Tariffs Loom (theverge.com) 105
Razer's upcoming Blade 16 and other laptops are no longer available for preorder or purchase on its US site. From a report: The configurator for preordering its new Blade 16 laptop was available as recently as April 1st, according to the Internet Archive -- one day before the Trump administration announced sweeping US tariffs on China, Taiwan, and others that make laptop components.
When asked recently if tariffs might affect Razer's prices or availability, its Public Relations Manager, Andy Johnston, told The Verge, "We do not have a comment at this stage regarding tariffs." Razer may not be openly talking about the impact of tariffs, but Framework halted sales of its entry-level Laptop 13 in the US on April 7th, and Micron reportedly confirmed surcharges for its memory chips will apply once the tariffs take effect after midnight tonight.
When asked recently if tariffs might affect Razer's prices or availability, its Public Relations Manager, Andy Johnston, told The Verge, "We do not have a comment at this stage regarding tariffs." Razer may not be openly talking about the impact of tariffs, but Framework halted sales of its entry-level Laptop 13 in the US on April 7th, and Micron reportedly confirmed surcharges for its memory chips will apply once the tariffs take effect after midnight tonight.
Informal Slashpoll (Score:2)
Are we going to see a story for every product pulled, because there likely will be more.
Your predictions on trade-war outcome?:
1. Ugly recession
2. Mild slowdown
3. Don yells "uncle" and scales back tariffs, blaming "woke globalists"
4. Tariffs do wonderful things and we all sing and dance in Donny's Perfect Military Parade
Re:Informal Slashpoll (Score:5, Interesting)
Some americans did yes. Slightly less than 49% of the people who voted. That's no excuse for violating the constitution and letting him do it, though.
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Violating the constitution was precisely what people voted for. We all knew he was going to do it.
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Violating the constitution was precisely what people voted for.
Precisely the people who should have their votes taken away.
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"The Constitution is not a suicide pact" [wikipedia.org]
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The trade war is stupid and will make most of us poor. But the companies eyeing lower cost to build and making more profit (still selling at the same price) started outsourcing this work ages ago.
Congress and politicians could have stopped it then but nope.
Now Trump thinks he knows the answer, but will end up helping cause the next great depression.
Insert Elmo with world burning GIF here (Score:1)
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Basic fact: $536 billion dollars were sent from the US to the EU in exchange for goods in 2024.
Basic fact: The median European makes $41k a year.
Basic fact: US market demand, regardless of the currency, employs 13 million Europeans.
You really are just so fucking stupid.
These weird fever-pitched dreams of the world somehow erasing $4 trillion dollars of revenue without knocking themselves into the Great Depression Part Deux is something that could only
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I wouldn't try to infer too much emotion from someone via the flavor of hot sauce they put on their sentences. I mean, given your previous post, I wouldn't be surprised if that's something you do- I imagine you get a lot of shit wrong in general with inference skills that fucking broken.
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What's at play here isn't dependence on the US dollar.
Pretend the numbers I gave were in International Dollars (a fake currency representing some equally convertible unit between the 2 currencies).
The problem that the EU needs to contend with is the money they make by exporting to the US, and the dependence their domestic economy has on that money.
Realistically, all of that money is converted into Euros already, so pretend that the demand is for a fucking massive su
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I'm not sure I agree that the EU or China is necessarily more fucked than the US, because the US will be have to cope with the gigantic inflationary spike in domestic prices of everything, which will be pretty damn destabilising. The rest of the world will see a mix of some major inflationary pressures of their own (but less, because they don't import as much US stuff, as you point out) but these get balanced by deflationary pressures caused by exporters seeking new markets for their previously US-bound goo
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Not that much. EU to US exports in 2023 were 822 gigaeuros, and US to EU exports in the same year were 774 gigaeuros (source [europa.eu]). It's about a 6% difference. But the EU will find it easier to make up the losses by trading with other countries than the US will, because the EU hasn't just annihilated its trustwor
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EU installs tariffs, because they can.
There is no damn magical "13million employees are relying on US-asians buying goods".
If half the sales drop: they work half the time and get government aid from the taxes they paid since they are employed.
EU puts tariffs on your stuff - more or less just for fun - because you started it.
That is all.
Do you think any good sells worse with tariffs? Sure, American cars. Unfortunately an iPhone or my next MacBook will be more expensive, too. Will it sell less? Unlikely. Peop
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Would have been the case, if it wasn't that a lot of industry in the EU has to pivot to producing military equipment. Lots of the money that went to/from the US will now remain more in the EU itself. Less of a problem than you think it will be. Don overstepped his position...as he always does, given his penchant of doing business that fails.
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But it's a different kind of fucked.
Inflation will skyrocket, but they'll also a whole shit-ton of fresh new money. It will turn into a reduction in our quality of life- money that used to be spent buying cool new toys now spent on basic shit.
My point is there is basically no new market that feasibly shows up to replace US-bound goods. Maybe if China dumped literal metric tons of capital into its people in an attempt to boost consumerism in a populatio
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But other factors make the US populace better suited to weather this.
As an experiment for yourself, try to figure out what market could possibly replace that demand- what basket of markets, even.
The US, on the other hand, will experience rapid inflation, but also a new rapid increase in savings as it becomes unable to convert its large incomes into foreign goods.
The US population is insanely consumerist, to a memeworthy extent. Approximately 50% larger than the EU, with approximatel
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There is no demand in the world that competes with US consumerism. US consumer demand is 69% of our GDP. It's really pretty fucking insane.
China's people do not have the money to replace US demand. Their incomes coupled with their traditionally very low level of consumerism leads to them being a highly export-driven economy. They're not going to produce $500B in demand to aim at the EU to save them from the sh
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You're missing the entire point of local currencies.
No, I'm not. I did that to help them see the bigger picture.
They don't depend on any other country or currency. You buy your own products with your own currency.
Indeed. But the EU does not have the domestic demand to make up for the shortfall. Period. There is no foreign demand they could conjure that can, either.
US consumer demand is 69% of its GDP. The next largest on the planet is the EU, at 50%.
A smaller percentage of a smaller number is a much smaller level of demand. There's nothing in the universe you can do to get Europeans to start spending more money. It's not like they're poor. Will their inve
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There's literally nothing the EU can do to increase its level of domestic consumption. You will need to find foreign consumption to make up the shortfall. But you won't again, because you can't.
The US is the m
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The trade imbalance only says one thing of any importance here: How much power Party A (the customer) has over Party B (the producer) by weaponizing their demand.
The difference itself is quite small. But it is a difference. It's a simple fact that the US has more travel in the screws it can tighten. It's not a lot, though. From any significant distance, it simply looks like mutually assured destruction.
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I agree, both the US and China are fucked by this trade war, just in different ways. Not much of that changes with the latest pronouncement, either, given that US-China trade is the single most important trading relationship in the global economy. The upswing for Apple's stock (I hold a fair amount from my days as an employee) is particularly Panglossian, because the only ways for Apple to protect its operating model is for the two countries to back down, or for it to be able to agree an aircover arrangemen
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And yes, there is a magical 13 million people employed by US consumer demand in the EU. That's basic economics. Where do you think that $500B in US money flowing into the EU goes?
Your logic is simply wrong. You make nonsense math games. And from there draw nonsense conclusions.
The employees in EU who work for US demand, most likely is 90million. Not 13million. And 15% of their work is export to the USA ... The amount of people working in the EU full time for the US market can only be a small hand full.
"The
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I don’t always agree with you, but on this I do. Trump sees that, eg, 2m jobs in Canada are in manufacturing goods for the US, and he thinks tariffs are a way to get them repatriated. The likely implications are that he can destroy a large chunk of the US demand that sustains those jobs, and he can redirect some of the US domestic demand towards new US-manufactured products and get a few jobs into the US but nowhere near the 2m, because the demand will be lower and the new manufacturing will be much m
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I'd like to be alive 100 years from now to read what history says about that dumbshit inhabiting the White House.
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Basic fact: US market demand, regardless of the currency, employs 13 million Europeans.
Everything looks great when you distill a highly complex multinational equation down to a single pair of countries, and then analyse it only in one direction. Those basic facts you quoted are precisely what you get when you read half of a trade report.
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Everything looks great when you distill a highly complex multinational equation down to a single pair of countries, and then analyse it only in one direction. Those basic facts you quoted are precisely what you get when you read half of a trade report.
It's distilled down intentionally- to dispell, people like you, I imagine, any notion that there is somewhere else you can recoup that $536B in demand.
There's nowhere else for the demand to be picked up. Nowhere. Period.
The EU doesn't have the domestic demand to pick it up. The Chinese don't have the money to pick it up. The South Americans don't either.
All this fuss is being made of the US weaponizing its economic power- but everyone else put the US in this fucking position.
The US is the largest consu
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Perhaps you've heard of the old adage "Politics is saying 'nice doggie'...while reaching for a stick"
The US *is* central to the current world economy for 'now', but that's FAR from something that has to exist. Every single country we do business with is looking elsewhere expressly because dealing with a madman isn't good for business.
We've already lost close to $100 billion in military contracts as counties realize having a US plane that might be 'turned off' (either the mythical off switch or just parts
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Perhaps you've heard of the old adage "Politics is saying 'nice doggie'...while reaching for a stick"
Yup.
The US *is* central to the current world economy for 'now', but that's FAR from something that has to exist. Every single country we do business with is looking elsewhere expressly because dealing with a madman isn't good for business.
There is nowhere else for them to go.
We've already lost close to $100 billion in military contracts as counties realize having a US plane that might be 'turned off' (either the mythical off switch or just parts supply) on you if you displease the emperor isn't a good security bet.
Good- then you understand how bad the problem the rest of the world faces here. The risk lies fully on the exporter, that is dependent upon consumer demand.
And lets talk aviation. The 2 biggest players are Boeing and Airbus. Guess which country the EU is likely to favor going forward?
Indeed. But you're still ignoring the other direction.
Quit looking at this as a supply-side emergency.
People will get past that. Local inflationary pressures will be balanced out by increased free discretionary spending from loss of foreign imports. It's a mess, but that all ends up ok.
The real problem for th
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and what you seem to ignore is that 5 countries that all have big holes with the US retraction can't make that up between each other.
People will get past that. Local inflationary pressures will be balanced out by increased free discretionary spending from loss of foreign imports. It's a mess, but that all ends up ok.
As you say, it works both ways. US only has itself to pick up the gap, the rest of the world has...literally the rest of the world to fall back on. Military limits that a bit for obvious political differences.
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and what you seem to ignore is that 5 countries that all have big holes with the US retraction can't make that up between each other.
You have 5 economies, all with economies largely hedged on exporting to the United States.
You now propose that they'll export to each other, despite the fact that all of them have entirely saturated domestic consumer demand.
Were it so easy.
Their consumer demand will be opened up a little bit- but for the most part, consumers aren't importing shit from the US. We don't make those kinds of products.
9.6% of EU exports to the US are vehicles. Do you think China wants their cars?
Do you think Europeans wan
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You can't just move around dollar amounts and pretend that they have universal sockets.
This you?
Local inflationary pressures will be balanced out by increased free discretionary spending from loss of foreign imports. It's a mess, but that all ends up ok
summary - the dollars will just move around and it all ends up ok.
You can't have it both ways. The 'current' state you describe is fair...but pretending "They can't hunt without that dog" is going to be proven foolhardy.
Hell, someone who randomly assigns you a 40% tariff, doubles down saying "it's happening" when actual smart people question them and then at the last minute issues a "90 pause".
The man's literally insane and given the US penchant for electing such people...believe me, the world w
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This you?
Yes.
summary - the dollars will just move around and it all ends up ok.
Uh, that's not moving dollars around- that's stopping an outflow of dollars, increasing local costs, and relying on people not deciding to eat their dollars instead of food they purchase with them.
That was a shit attempt at formulating a contradiction.
You can't have it both ways. The 'current' state you describe is fair...but pretending "They can't hunt without that dog" is going to be proven foolhardy.
Ok- that's fair. Statement withdrawn.
They can- for sure- it will just require building up after a pretty major contraction of their economy.
The game is seeing how willing they are to take that route.
Hell, someone who randomly assigns you a 40% tariff, doubles down saying "it's happening" when actual smart people question them and then at the last minute issues a "90 pause".
Ya, he's quite clearly a fucking madman.
If you think
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"How do businesses pay their employees"
In the case of the European Union, they pay their employees with Euros. For the UK, with the British Pound. Very few people are paid in US dollars over there.
What do those countries need US dollars then if it isn't to pay their employees? Simple: they need US dollars to purchase things that are sold in US dollars.
Generally speaking, the one core thing sold in US dollars that causes most countries in the world to seek US dollars, is oil. Several oil-producing countries made a pact with the US in that they'd
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The us is made to purchase the euro and send that over to Europe to pay all those people.
WoW that wasn't that hard to figure out. And as the USD goes down in value it will cost more to buy those Euros.
Re:Informal Slashpoll (Score:5, Funny)
I vote for 5.
5. CowboyNeal spikes the water supply with LSD and humanity unites to fight the UberRat, an entity presenting itself as a giant rat but doesn't actually exist despite haunting our minds... in addition to driving an Uber as a side gig.
Re:Informal Slashpoll (Score:4, Funny)
5. Congresscritters grow spines and put an halt on this.
Growing bones is a nasty business, so you probably need to pass through 1 first.
I'd love to see it (Score:1)
I don't believe Musk is opposed to the tariffs despite some rumors to the contrary either. Remember that the tariffs are only there so that Trump can shift the tax burden of the billionaires onto you and me. That's 5 trillion dollars all told. For a guy like Musk with 300 billion dollars to his name that wil
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Muskrat has said publicly that he will spend unlimited money to primary any politician that crosses Trump.
Well, it didn't help Brad Schimel in Wisconsin now, did it ? :)
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If the market keeps going in the direction it is, and if Tesla keeps leading that charge, Musk may not have unlimited money with which to buy democracy.
At some point one of his companies is going to have a loan come due that he was planning to pay with shares, and the contractual share price to do so in the loan will be underwater. At which point he's going to have to shit a mountain of cash or watch his leveraged empire fall.
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If TSLA drops to zero, he's still got about 2/3rds of his net worth to offer as collateral.
With all the shit that fucker owns, if he actually goes down- he falls upon our charred corpses.
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Musk didn't attack Trump. Instead, he attacked Peter Navarro (Trump's economic advisor and tariffs architect) for being a "moron" and "dumber than a sack of bricks". Trump's Whitehouse spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded to their spat by saying "Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue."
I *wish* I made those quotes up or they were from The Onion. No, those are truly their quotes!
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They can't find them. [reddit.com]
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5. Congresscritters grow spines and put an halt on this.
Growing bones is a nasty business, so you probably need to pass through 1 first.
Growing bones has been tried. During the Vietnam war our now commander in chief tried to grow a spine but only ended up growing a small spur.
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Lot of people hurt, a lot of jobs lost, all to satisfy one piece of shit's ego, and in the end- for nothing.
I hope the fuckers who voted for this shit-for-brains are satisfied with their decision.
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I’m not so sure the toothpaste goes back into the tube that easily, though.
This requires only a minor recession, and the inflationary shock from even a temporary tariff hike may be too great for that. On top of that, I think there’s a chunk of trade that’s going to focus on other markets now, as being more predictable even if less profitable. Plus, it requires China to cooperate. China may exact a pretty high price for cooperation. Yes, China gets badly hurt, but it can inflict a lot of pa
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Agree.
"The worst trade deal we ever had was Canada and Mexico", says trump as he adds tariffs on to both.
PS he did the trade deal with Mexico and Canada.
Kinda like the Dr shooting you in the foot then proclaiming "Hey I can fix that for you!"
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I wouldn't worry about us.
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Are we going to see a story for every product pulled, because there likely will be more.
Your predictions on trade-war outcome?:
1. Ugly recession
2. Mild slowdown
3. Don yells "uncle" and scales back tariffs, blaming "woke globalists"
4. Tariffs do wonderful things and we all sing and dance in Donny's Perfect Military Parade
Are any of these mutually exclusive?
I can see all 4 happening, probably in this order, 4 -> 2 -> 4 -> 1 -> 3 -> 1 on repeat.
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4., of course. Those who refuse to sing and dance get deported.
I checked (Score:3)
Their laptop range is sold between 2500-3500 euros. I would expect someone ready to pay that much for a specific brand wouldn't care if tariff increased. Previously we had this argument, when Framework stopped shipping the lowest priced laptops to US. I guess Razer they did their studies and concluded the Asian market is enough for them.
I don't know how much they sell, but the only keyboard layout available is ANSI (the wide/narrow Enter key) which is showstopper for many EU buyers. Users can always buy stickers to cover the letters for any language, but the shape of the Enter key has strong muscle memory associated.
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Their laptop range is sold between 2500-3500 euros. I would expect someone ready to pay that much for a specific brand wouldn't care if tariff increased.
Moderate amounts- I'd agree with you.
The upcoming- what is it- 110%? No, I think that'd end their business here outright if the entire computer was assessed. I have no idea what percentage of it would be subject, but I can confidently say nobody's spending $8k on a Razer.
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I don't know how much they sell, but the only keyboard layout available is ANSI (the wide/narrow Enter key) which is showstopper for many EU buyers. Users can always buy stickers to cover the letters for any language, but the shape of the Enter key has strong muscle memory associated.
I don’t know how much gaming has changed since the days of wearing my WASDs down to the clicky nubs, but reading about the Enter key being a showstopper on a gaming laptop, is about as expected as finding sandpaper on a porn set instead of lube.
Weird.
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Someone else commented in this page they were given a Razer laptop for work. I have colleagues who have taken the "gaming laptop" option for some CAD thing.
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a) most games require chatting
b) the enter key is not the same as the return key
I used to play 3D shooters with keyboard only. I had a Cherry full keyboard with numpad.
My right hand on the num pad, my left on the traditional W S A D ... (and Q E Z C - X).
I do not think I used the "enter key" for anything, perhaps dropping a mine, not sure.
But on this laptop, they insisted to put a numpad on, which is close to useless, as the keys have half the width of the other ones. The "real enter key" (the one on the nu
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Their laptop range is sold between 2500-3500 euros. I would expect someone ready to pay that much for a specific brand wouldn't care if tariff increased.
I think you are clueless. There is a product, and a price. If I'm willing to pay the price, that means in no way that I'm willing to pay a higher price. And there are the people who saved $2,500 to buy a new computer, so they decided to buy Razer. It turns out they can't buy Razer for that money, so they switch to something that was $1,800 before tariffs.
Or they pay nothing at all and buy nothing. Because the reality is, I don't pay $2,500 for a new computer. I pay $2,500 for the difference in value betw
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Their laptop range is sold between 2500-3500 euros. I would expect someone ready to pay that much for a specific brand wouldn't care if tariff increased.
Razer direct sales makes very little business. The vast majority of their gear in America is sold through white goods stores. That is what this is about: the volume being too low to be worth while dealing with the added cost. They can let big box retailers absorb the cost of tariffs and import headaches.
By the way consumers even in the high end are cost conscious, maybe not to scrap through a $30 saving which can be a significant chunk of a low end laptop, but we're not talking about a minor tax here, we're
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The tariff on products from China, where many of Razer's products are made, is 105%. So A 2,500 Euro laptop is going to be over 5,000 Euro now. At least for Americans.
Some of the retro gaming people on Reddit are panicking now, because their formerly cheap FPGA systems coming from China are now looking rather expensive. Chances are the 105% won't last more than a week before going up either, because China is likely to introduce reciprocal tariffs, and then Trump will retaliate, creating an infinite loop.
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I would expect someone ready to pay that much for a specific brand wouldn't care if tariff increased.
Then you are bad in math.
2500 +25% -> 3125
3500 +25% -> 4375
If I have to by a 4375EURO laptop, I expect an Apple inside, an Apple outside, a Titanium chassis, a battery live of 24h and some other gimicks. Perhaps some Blinking! Lights! ??
Wait, to calculate 3500 + 25% I used the windows calc app on this fucked up Acer ... perhaps it made a rounding error?
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Pretty sure everyone will notice a 104% increase in price.
Next up: cars and houses (Score:5, Interesting)
Hope you weren't too attached to your middle-class lifestyle. But remember, your patriotic sacrifices help ensure Larry Ellison can afford his next yacht.
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Don't be silly. Larry Ellison buys islands, not yachts. You think he's a poor or something?
It's not just tarriffs (Score:1)
In other news (Score:2)
My business of smuggling electronics to the USA is thriving.
Thank you Great Leader Trump!
PS The check with your cut of the extra profits is in the mail.
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The ultimate irony is that for years there have been stories of people coming to the US and buying suitcases of iPhones to take back somewhere with high tariffs and unload them at profit.
Soon we might actually see people with empty suitcases arriving in Hanoi and Bangkok to buy cheap electronics to smuggle back to the US.
But I'm sure the TRUST ME BRO economic plan is going to turn shit around any day now...
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And nothing of value was lost... (Score:2)
i know they were pioneers of RGB stuff, but my experience with Razer stuff is pretty "meh".
Had two Razer Blades for work, and both were loud AF and had no way to modify Fan curves to stop them from being so.
Ended up having to throttle CPU via Windows power profile to limit max cpu to 95%. Thus it never Boosted above its base rate which was fine for what i needed but lost significant performance had i actually needed it.
And even so they were constantly warm to the touch all over, though fortunately i mostl
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Agreed.
I've had a couple things from them over the years (mice, headset - no laptop) and been rather underwhelmed at the quality and features for the price. Give me a Logitech G-series mouse any day - they don't require you to have a fucking cloud login to get the full features.
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Our future (Score:2)
Our future is already upon us:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
It's telling how badly this site has gotten (Score:3, Insightful)
when you have to doom-scroll to find a comment about the actual story verses the shear amount of stupid crying over Trump and Musk.
The fact of this story is "no one in there right mind cares about Razor products" and if you think Razor is going to have any sway on the US market your in the above group.
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You missed “shear” instead of “sheer”
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Well, it's not just about Razer, it's that all electronics manufacturers are going to follow suit in the short to medium term.
Also, lack of competition is just bad from a consumer pov. Dell, HP and Asus will have crappier, more expensive products if Razer isn't there pushing. (as much as i don't particularly like Razer's stuff)
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It's not just Razor though, is it? Inflation is going to go through the roof for Americans.
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Meh, Razer (Score:1)
The market for RGB blinky blinky equipment is vanishingly small, so who cares?
I, for one, am looking forward to the prices for everything else dropping outside of the USA - because there'll be all that excess product that was bound for the USA and now has to be sold elsewhere to avoid losses.
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Probably my least favorite thing about teh ecosystem. It's just not very fucking good at all.
Re:Meh, can go get a MacBook for cheaper... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think MacBook prices are going to stay stable, you’ve not been paying attention
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For those prices ($2500+), I can get a MacBook and something actually worth writing home about.
MacBooks, that infamously excellent gaming platform. What other insightful things do you have to say? On a story of car prices you say for that price you can buy a BBQ with wheels on it?