Linus comes clean about his Razer experience

So delicious.

 

Owned a Razer Blade 2015 14".

Terrible laptop. Battery died within a year. Sourcing a new one in Europe is difficult (and expensive). Keyboard keys were really badly worn after same time. Replacement keyboard? Forget about it...

Oh yeh, single HDMI 1.4 output. Nice one Razer. Should have checked before buying it.

Thank god for eBay.

 

I honestly thought he was too forgiving in this video. To me it sounded like he will still get razer products. And honestly if he was having these problems I would expect him to say something outside of a product review. Especially Linus who has in the past shown he will gladly call out a company if they done wrong. I really think he should've more strongly talked about how terrible the customer service is with a Razer Product. Oh well. . .better than nothing.

 

I’m sorry but I had Blade 14 2015, shorts time late 2016 changed it to 2017 due Fans issues within 3 days. Both 2015 and 2017 has no single issue till now (2015 one is used by a friend for photography). Do you guys noticed the RMA reasons, i don’t know about late 2016 model but even I’m not technicall geek I think if it happen to my device I can handle the problems through asking around and googling, before contact support, thanks to this forum and other forums about the Blade. When i was owning 2015 i don’t even know what undervolting was, just using the Blade for gaming. Linus team is technical geek I think, they should handle and know the problems well, but from the comments in the table it like me when I just get new gaming laptops (Blade 2015) after owning MacBook Pro and facing those issues.

 

I was lucky and my late 1060 model never had any problems. But, Razer Support has been insanely bad. I tried to order a few things from them and my cancel was ordered. They wanted my Photo I.D. and a photo of my untility bills to verify I was who I was. I refused because I thought it was uncalled for and made purchases through them many times before. Now Razer Support won’t even respond to my emails. I try to tell people that they need to be avoided at all costs since they have terrible buissness practices and basically no support for their products.

Luckily companies like acer and asus are making smaller and smaller laptops that are arguably better than anything Razer offers. So hopefully some friendly competition has them get their act together.

Though I will never buy from them again.

 

Yes agree, more competition make one manufacture better. I also saw order issues recently, first I thought it was non legit website, I just used my CC last year to buy Blade late 2016 because there was no Paypal options but had no such issues. I think they put more security layers on CC order. Might be up now it’ll be better with PayPal. About CS, i live in Germany, I’m satisfied with support here (always call them since it in Hamburg) they still support even my over 4 years Razer Edge, like providing usb installer free when I had boot issue (undone windows update), and when my stealth order came late they provide almost €80 voucher for cases and €20 for shopping in Razerzone which is nice. I had several issues with i think headquarters marketing team, but CS here covered it and solved the problem, so far I have no complaints about their CS here.

 

That's interesting to here that Customer Support is better in Germany. But, I'm glad they're taking care of you. My issue wasn't getting solved so I wanted to talk to a manger on the phone. When I got the call it was just a normal rep. So to me I feel they don't care to fix my issue. So I'm giving up and moving on.

Oh and my issue with payment was with paypal. So it's just ordering with them in general. And I for one was raised to not give out I.D. or sensitive information.

 

I see, sorry for that. I just ordered jacket with PayPal because they have good deals this week, and it seems the last one on the size, I hope it will go well, we’ll see. Before I bought mouse also with PayPal was no issue, maybe I’m just lucky idk, though I’m agree for not giving ID or sensitive information, as i said above i thought also at first time it was not from “real” Razer CS, since it happened I think recently right?

 

Yeah this happened to me in the last month. So very recent. What gets me is that they kinda play it off as normal. Like you shouldn’t be worried about giving that to them. i Used the example that Sony and Microsoft had their information leaked and were much larger companies. That might be what upset them to not talk to me anymore. Lol.

All honestly it’s ok. I’m over it.

 

Well designed, but poorly constructed hardware with disgusting after-sales support.

That sums up Razer laptops for me.

I love my Blade 14 (2013), and it's still my "main" PC, but I most definitely will not be buying Razer again any time soon...

 

Yeah, pretty glad I did not go with a Razer, looking back on it now. It was only a matter of time before the other manufactures took notice and responded with competitively designed laptops.
Now if I had found one for a really good deal, then yeah, I probably could not have resisted.

 

I feel like I got super lucky with my 2014 Blade. I had it for about 3 years, put it through hell and back with thousands of hours of gaming and it held up well. The only time I had to deal with their support was to ask for a USB drive for factory reset and they shipped it no questions asked. I got this EVOC in the spring last year and it's seen it's share of issues in the less than a year that I've had it. but it seems to be working well at the moment. I really like it when it's not misbehaving, true beast performance wise and the 4K panel is nice (I'm spoilt by all the hidpi panels i've owned since 2013 I'll never go back.)

I let the Blade collect dust and the battery expanded sometime while it was sitting idle. Had to rip the bottom panel apart to get it out and dispose of it because the pressure on the chassis was so great the small screws wouldn't turn. It was crazy, the keyboard and trackpad were all bowed out. Now I have a panel, mainboard and keyboard, three fans, and the power adapter for parts basically. I'll probably just end up recycling it, not really worth it to even waste time boxing it up and shipping it.

 

I'll take your blade parts for a project!

 

This is a very sad thing to read primarily because throughout the years you were very supportive of Razer and appeared to be very supportive of them as a company and their products. And to hear that happening to even you is disappointing at least to me. Ming constantly compares his products to Apple Products (At least from a social media perspective) but appears that they still have a long way to go to get to the level of Apple in terms of Support and durability of their products as I have yet to have a Macbook have any issues close to what's happening here.

 

I got this EVOC because 1080.. 6.5lb.. 4K fans are quieter than a Blade... let me reiterate [email protected].. it's crazy fast for that weight class.

I definitely like the weight and keyboard from the Blade much more, but overall I was looking for something that wasn't 9-12lb that had a 1080 and the fans were "relatively" quiet for the power. There really isn't another laptop with this combo.. The only one that comes close that has quiet fans the the Zephyr with the 1070. It's nice that we're starting to see some quieter and lighter notebooks with upper-tier GPUs. It's too bad Razer isn't trying harder on those fronts.

There's nothing to be sad about. I had that Blade for three years and pushed it super hard and it kept rolling down the tracks. It was literally sitting in storage every day after I got the EVOC (April 2017). It's pretty hard on an aging battery to sit without being charged, but it wasn't up for it. Also Razer doesn't use a "battery saver" mode that will not charge the battery past 70-80% which can greatly increase the lifetime of the battery for those like me that keep their notebooks plugged in 100% of the time. "Storing" your battery at a high charge level for long periods is not good for the battery. It is what it is. I knew the battery had lost charge and was starting to fail, I should have removed it. Sucks, but thems the breaks.

But still.. the take away is I really pushed that thing hard for 3 solid years and it didn't falter. So far my EVOC hasn't been as reliable, but it's definitely faster.

 

No no no no. This is exactly what Razer, Apple, and other fan based hardware groups love. People to blame themselves for their (in this case dangerous) faults.

I have had over 25 Laptops; a few sitting around for years with whatever charge was left on them. Battery expansion and bulging breaking machines is not *to be expected* as you summarized. This is 100% manufacturer's fault, no matter how much you liked the laptop.

EDIT: pbhenry3 describes the fault in detail here:

"yes I see it in every razer model. I have had a few show up in the mail here that were leaking electrolyte, a couple which have actually exploded and caught fire when removing the back cover which was only held on with a remaining 3 or so screws, some which have damaged the trackpad left/right click by expanding so far that the battery pulls on the cable so hard it rips the entire connector off the motherboard side along with every single pad. It is a daily occurence here.

razer uses 3 cells in series and 3 cells in parallel. the problem with the parallel configuration is that it needs to be assembled by a professional. since only in series cells have proper cell balancing, the in parallel configured cells can only be as good as the manufacture makes them to be. you need to use cells from the same lot number, same manufacture date, that have sat in the same conditions since manufacture to assembly, they night to have tight tolerance control, they need to be professionally measured with calibration equipment prior to assembly, because if any parameters are off a bit, the parallel configured cells will drift further apart with each charge cycle. A lot of manufactures use in parallel configured cells but they have better quality controll when assembling the packs. but even if you do have them perfectly matched, it is still never ideal from a longevity perspective. If you want longevity in cycle count for a battery pack, you need to just have them wired in series. Of course with many other proper aspects as well, such as charge current stages being accurate, good charge controller on motherboard side, and pcb protection circuitry in battery pack, and of course good cells themselves to begin with."

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/razer-blade-pro-2017-battery-bulge.812951/page-4

 

None of them are immune, I've seen batteries expand and fail from all of them practically. It's an across the board problem.

And also, I blamed Razer for not allowing the use of a "battery saver" mode to keep the charge level lower. I could have really used that as I never unplugged it.

 

Hmm yes and no, i did see some battery packs expand. For example some older macbook pro's the first versions with pouch style cells (lipo's). But in general it has been fairly stable past years.

Some manufacturers (Razer, Gigabyte) do use inferior battery packs in general.

 

Add alienware battery controller as well. Pulls 60W to charge battery to charge from 0-60% and then drops to 50W.

 

I perosnally did not have huge issues with Alienware batteries. Except that I had the software issue after using desktop mode.

But never a real battery failure. Sony and Samsung batteries also lasted me quite long. Especially the Samsung batteries are exceptional in laptops. Had more than 40 Samsung laptops at my office, none of them had battery issues even after 4 years of use including my own which I gave to my mom after I bought a new one.