Razer Is Back to Selling One of Its Laptops Despite Tarrifs

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Tech company Razer made headlines earlier in April when it temporarily stopped selling all its laptops and the newly announced laptop stand. Although the company did not comment on the change, it seemed likely it was tied to President Donald Trump’s heavy tariffs on Chinese-made goods.

As of Friday, the Razer Blade 16 has reappeared on Razer’s website — kind of. The only model of the Razer Blade 16 for sale at this time is the one that comes with the Nvidia RTX 5080, an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365, 2TB of storage and 64GB of RAM for $3,799. If you attempt to change any of those specs using Razer’s configurator, the website either throws a 404 error or says that the laptop with that particular configuration is still out of stock.

A representative for Razer did not respond to CNET’s request for comment.

Per The Verge, Razer has also altered its configurations. If you attempt to equip the Razer Blade 16 with an Nvidia RTX 5090, it locks the laptop into 64GB of RAM and 4TB of storage. However, review units that many reviewers used were equipped with an RTX 5090, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.

As of Friday, the 14- and 18-inch Razer laptops and the laptop stand are still listed as out of stock and attempting to use Razer’s configurator still throws errors. Customers will have to wait for the rest of the stock to reappear if they don’t want that one particular configuration of the Razer Blade 16. 

What changed?

At the time that online laptop sales were first paused, Trump was increasing China tariffs almost daily, culminating in a 145% tariff increase on Chinese goods as of last Friday.

The president’s stance seems to have softened a little since then. The administration exempted smartphones, computers and other electronics from being affected by tariffs, which may account for Razer slowly bringing its laptop sales back online.

 The exemptions had other effects as well. Nintendo had initially delayed its Switch 2 pre-orders due to tariffs, and reversed course late this week with pre-orders now starting on April 24. 

Laptop maker Framework, which had increased prices due to the tariffs, also lowered prices on some of its laptops after the exemptions.