Razer Unveils First Optical Keyboard Switches in a Laptop

Razer made its name creating flashy gaming peripherals like mice, headset, and of course, keyboards. It has since moved into the laptop space with the Blade series of gaming-oriented notebooks. Its previous innovation in laptop keyboards has been mostly limited to equipping them with RGB LEDs, but the new Razer Blade 15 Advanced is the first laptop with optical keyboard switches. Razer says these allow for improved responsiveness and typing feel, but you’ll pay handsomely to get them.

Razer has, thankfully, not followed Apple in making laptop keys even lower travel. The new optical switches have even more travel than the company’s traditional laptop keys, and there are fewer moving parts.

The optical switches rely on a beam of infrared light to actuate each press — it’s somewhat similar to gaming keyboards like the Wooting One. The switches fire at 1mm, but the total key travel is 1.7mm. That’s about 50 percent better than Razer’s other laptop keyboards. There’s also a parallel mechanism that produces a satisfying mechanical click, but that doesn’t seem to be at all related to the actual functionality of the switch. Still, this should count as a “mechanical” keyboard because the switches actuate before bottoming out. It also has per-key RGB support.

If you want the fancy new optical keyboard switches, you’ll need to get the “Advanced” version of the Blade 15, and they only come in specific SKUs of that device. Presumably, these new switches will come to other Razer laptop models in the future.

The base model has the standard scissor mechanism in its keyboard, and the LED lighting is limited to a single color. That laptop costs a mere $1,500, but the Advanced model with the optical keys is around $2,650. However, that does include virtually every feature you could want in a gaming laptop, including a Core i7 CPU, an Nvidia RTX 2070, 16GB of RAM, and a 240Hz display.

Continue reading

ARMing for War: New Cortex-A78C Will Challenge x86 in the Laptop Market

ARM took another step towards challenging x86 in its own right with the debut of the Cortex-A78C this week. The new chip packs up to eight "big" CPU cores and up to an 8MB L3 cache.

Apple’s New M1 SoC Looks Great, Is Not Faster Than 98 Percent of PC Laptops

Apple's new M1 silicon really looks amazing, but it isn't faster than 98 percent of the PCs sold last year, despite what the company claims.

Best Games for Laptops and Low-End PCs in 2020

Just because you've got an older or low-end PC doesn't mean you can't enjoy gaming. There are thousands of back titles in the PC catalog. Here are some of our favorites.

ET Deals: Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Intel Core i7-1165G7 Laptop for $674, iRobot Roomba i7+ 7550 Robot Vacuum for $599

Today you can take advantage of a 10 percent discount to snag a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 laptop with an Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, 12GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD for just $674. You can also get iRobot's Roomba i7+ robot vacuum for just $599.00, which is the same price it was on Cyber Monday.