There is no reason for me to buy this. Laptops like this have a very specific valid use case which is people that travel all the time and want to play video games. If you are not traveling all the time and want to play video games buying a desktop and a laptop will likely give you a better experience in both aspects and could potentially be less expensive.

Gaming laptops seem relevant for VR and/or machine learning developers. I suppose for machine learning you can use cloud based GPUs but it's still not a bad idea to have a decent offline setup.

Running 'serious' GPU experiments on your primary laptop is a pretty miserable experience. If the experiment needs a few hours to compute, you have to prevent your laptop from sleeping. I also doubt the laptop will last long if you regularly max out the GPU for 12 hours at a time.

That said...Developing against a cloud machine sucks too. I think VNCing to a machine on the local network from a good ultrabook might be best.

> Developing against a cloud machine sucks too

Really depends on where your cloud is in relation to you. I'm currently sitting in a coffee shop, and ping times to my workstation at home (on the other side of the city) are ~5ms.

For me it's never the ping times that are a problem, but bandwidth. Shuffling 50+ GB of data back and forth gets annoying very fast.

Yea we have an Alienware laptop with similar specs a work we use for demoing and testing VR projects while on the road, but day to day development in the office is generally done on workstations.

I work at a games development studio, and we have a couple of similarly extremely specced laptops, we use them every time we go to game conferences and such, to run full suite of servers needed to start the game in a limited environment.

No kidding, I went to E3 2015 (as a demoist) with a Laptop that had 64G of ram and a 6 core CPU.

The thing was so expensive that I had to declare it through customs.

The thing was grunty though; not a machine for document editing and email.

Shamelessly looking through your comments, I'm 99% certain we work at the same company :P

Yes, that sounds like the spec we sent to E3 2 years ago to run our servers for the demo booth - had to be fully encrypted as well.

Since I even listed the name of the studio I work at, if you're saying this it's entirely possible. :)

As a matter of fact, we work on the exact same game :P The world is small(or hacker news is)

Nope. Not remotely worth it. The off center keyboard would be a deal breaker even if it were $1k less.

I'm not sure why the off-centre keyboard is a deal breaker.

I use a Microsoft semi-split ergonomic keyboard, and a Razer Naga mouse (heaps of bindings for dev stuff). Prior to getting the ergonomic keyboard (and a decent mouse) I had pretty extreme RSI.

However, if I look at my keyboard setup right now, whilst the keyboard as a whole looks fairly centred, ever so slightly to my left due to the mouse. The keys I actually type on (i.e. not the arrow keys or numpad) are all farther off centre, to my left. I'd assume this to be the case for most devs, excluding perhaps vi/emacs aficionados whom don't ever use their mouse.

It's hard to tell without touching the laptop, but I doubt having the keyboard off centre is going to cause problems. If anything I find using the trackpad on my Macbook below the keyboard gives me extreme RSI pain (I don't do it except when travelling).

The price tag is fairly extreme, but it's roughly on par with a high-end Macbook Pro (which many devs, including myself, use), however unlike a Macbook Pro it has the hardware to back-up the price tag.

My 15" rMBP was "only" $3k. The Razer is 50% more! It's a 2012 and still doing great. The Razer is closer to desktop performance, but that also means the battery life is abysmal.

True, my top-end rMBP from Late 2013 was around the same price and still doing reasonably well.

However, the current top-end rMBP is $4,299.00, whilst the top-end Razer Blade Pro is $4499.99. They're certainly both in the same (insanely expensive) ballpark, with the Razer Blade Pro having:

* a significantly higher resolution display * twice the RAM * a touch display * a higher resolution webcam * a significantly better GPU.

In favour of the rMBP:

* 15", instead of 17" (although that's my personal preference) * Faster CPU (I think, I'm not up to date on which model beats which)

I'm by no means suggesting go out and buy a Razer Blade Pro. Just that, whilst expensive, it's no worse value for money than other high-end market laptops that are presently available.

Not only it is off-center but those mechanical switches seem to have attracted quite a lot of criticism.

To me a low-quality keyboard is a deal breaker, much more so than a less-than-perfect trackpad, because if you don't like the trackpad you can always carry a small, portable mouse while if you don't like the keyboard you don't really have a solution.

Being left-handed the off-center keyboard is also a bit right-handed for me. I have no use for a number pad on the right of the keyboard either. I just prefer Chromebook keyboards now, i.e. chicklet, centered and with no funny keys for Windows things or weird Apple keys that should be the right mouse button.

you nailed the top two deal-breakers in my eyes, too.

As someone who travels regularly between countries and likes to game, this is really the only option for me (MSI gaming laptops et al have in my experience been absolutely trash in terms of durability). An mITX case albeit very small compared with traditional desktops, just doesn't have the portability this provides.

In saying that, I'll wait 6 months and watch the price ease, decent reviews to roll in and the kinks to be worked out.

Just putting this on your radar (in case it isn't already), but the Alienware 13 r3 and 15 r3 both hit a pretty sweet spot for portable gaming.

Not saying one is better or another, just letting you know they are out there and that you should consider them too :)

shrug I wouldn't know, but as I understand it, people will sometimes spend a lot of money on hobbies. Also, I'd hope that most software developers don't need the best-of-the-best laptops to do their jobs -- perhaps this is targeted at video editors, or pro gamers?

I rather get a graphics workstation from Lenovo.

Currently on a W541.

Still light enough to carry, has enough 3D juice (NVIDIA Quadro K1100M) and way cheaper than that.

I also have a W541, love it - 32GB of ram, multiple SSDs and retina level screen with removable battery

Not portable and it spec out everything.

I care mostly about Ram for virtual machines.

The GPU is whatever I don't need it as much, maybe if I get into neural network.

CPU just needs to be fast but not insane to burn my wallet really.

I'd like mine to be portable to do work not play games.. This laptop is not it.

I think Dell got a nice 32 gb ram one with good spec and decent price.

A new Mac Book Pro with all the optional extras (e.g. bigger SSD, better graphics) costs more.

(at least in the UK)

About €4K gets you a thin and beautiful laptop you can actually carry with you and that you don't need to uninstall Windows before being productive.

A little bit more, but at about 8 hours of battery.

http://imgur.com/a/ibQNl

i wouldn't even buy it for $1 with that off-center keyboard.

in fact, you probably couldn't even pay me to use it.

It is an odd design choice, I wonder how much it will effect your back after a few hours, from offsetting your right arm, or conversely your next from offsetting your entire body and turning your head.

Anecdotaly I had to get a third monitor as my next was aching from always turning straight to right then back only, no left turning.

Well the problem is the question "how about you devs". This is very much not aimed at developers or professionals of really any kind (well maybe one kind). This is aimed squarely at gamers.

I used to play semi-pro gaming back before it was a televised event, and an offset keyboard was normal. The mouse was of equal importance, and home row was WASD. I controlled the keyboard with my left hand exclusively, so having it offset to the left on a laptop would make sense. Of course, I wouldn't use a track pad but I actually know people who did (believe it or not).

The target market for this device already have their keyboard offset to the left. And they're not typing 120wpm into NetBeans.

(Besides, as a desktop replacement they're almost expecting you're going to have a mouse and keyboard attached)

Exactly. I'm sure there are professionals who buy Razr products for the performance and form factor but the target audience is going to view this as a 17 inch laptop with a 1080 that's way thinner and lighter than the competition. That said an equivalent MSI laptop is $1500 so they're certainly aiming upmarket.

If the keyboard weren't off-centered, and it's hardware played nice with linux (not sure on this) then I'd consider it.

I think there is at least an effort, recently, on Razer's side to support linux across their hardware, as per this recent official thread in their support forums: https://insider.razerzone.com/index.php?threads%2Fwelcome-to...

You'll find most mouse users have off center keyboards. Also, the keyboard can be center, you need only look slightly right.