 For three generations, the Razer Blade 14 has awed me with its astonishingly compact design, fantastic aesthetic, and superb build quality. Which puts the Razer Blade Stealth 2016, the product I'm evaluating today, in a somewhat unique position. One of being on the inside, looking in. Because I'll be deciding on a new daily driver notebook before this video is over, and whether Razer wins or loses. Razer is going to lose. Which will also cause Razer to win. Meaning that Razer will also lose. Which... okay, the joke's old now. Roll the intro. INTEL Intel has brought DDR4 to the mainstream with their Core i7-6700K processor. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. I think the smart thing to do here would be to begin with a physical tour. Which is easy, because Razer has taken just about a pure if it ain't broke, don't fix it approach in this regard. The top of the machine is black with only a Razer logo, the illumination of which can be disabled now if you want, a nice touch. And a couple of accent ridges to adorn it, just like its bigger brother. The bottom has two rubber feet, the rear taller than the front, to incline the keyboard gently toward the user. And a couple of air intakes, just like its bigger brother. And if I looked hard enough, I could probably find a dozen such similarities. But you didn't come here for similarities, you came here for differences. So let's focus in on those for a moment here. The discrete left and right click buttons under the touchpad have been replaced by a gesture-aware click pad. This is a change that would bother me if they hadn't implemented it so well. No issues in two-handed operation, and palm rejection was solid. So good on you. The speakers are both narrower and closer to the edge to salvage as much room as possible for the surprisingly spacious keyboard, which has been completely overhauled with RGB lighting. More on that later. The big change though, is that the Blade Stealth is significantly thinner and lighter than the Blade 14. Shaving 0.7 inches diagonally off the screen size, and about 0.75 of a kilogram off the weight, making it only 2.75 pounds. So light enough then, that I can pretty much not tell whether it's in my 4.5 pound backpack or not. Something that I can't say about my daily driver Blade 14. And it manages to do all of this while maintaining a very respectable mix of I.O. Apple should take notes. On the right is a USB 3.0 port and an HDMI 1.4 output. Then on the left is a 3.5 millimeter headphone microphone combo jack, another USB 3.0 port, and a USB type C connector that handles Thunderbolt, USB 3.0, DisplayPort, and charging duties through the compact included AC adapter. This is the port that will be used to enable the theoretically hot-swappable, although I did manage to break it at the demo at CES, external dedicated graphics card housing that they're calling the Razer Core, which I will be covering in an upcoming separate video. Today though, I'm focused on the Blade Stealth as an ultrabook, because that's what it is. While the slim exterior definitely hints at what makes the Blade Stealth so different from Razer's previous mobile devices, all of which adhered to that for gamers, by gamers slogan that they've got displayed so prominently on their website, the inside of this machine reveals outright that it is not a gaming device. So regardless of which model you buy then, I've got the 1199 256 gig quad HD skew, but I spent most of my time with the 999 base model, the one with the white vinyl skin from dbrand here, you'll be getting a few things. An Intel Core i7-6500U 2.5 GHz base, 3.1 GHz boost, hyper-threaded dual core processor, with Intel HD Graphics 520, yes my friends, onboard graphics, and 8 gigs of non-upgradable, soldered dual channel low-power DDR3. Then, depending on which trim level you opt for, you can get anywhere from 128 gigs to 512 gigs of unspecified M.2 NVMe storage. On mine, it was a Samsung PM951, so about as basic as it gets for an NVMe drive, with sequential writes limited on the 128 gig version to the rated 150 megabytes or so, thanks to its TLC NAND. Do note, however, that I would take a basic native PCIe drive over a SATA one any day of the week. The other user configurable spec is the screen, which I guess leads me to one of the things that frustrates me about Razer's systems. What if I don't mind the 2560x1440 touchscreen sRGB color space display? It's the one I've got here, and frankly, everything about it looks fantastic at 13.3 inches. Contrast, brightness, and sharpness are great. So what if I want that, instead of the Adobe RGB 4K monitor, whose advantages, while tangible, won't benefit me personally, and whose higher resolution will drain my battery faster, but I also want a 512 gig SSD? I will need to upgrade it after the fact. Although all of this is irrelevant, if the experience of using the Blade Stealth isn't a good one, and you shouldn't buy one anyway. So how is that? Well, for a thousand dollar machine, the 6500U processor, with its 90% usage while installing applications, and CPU bottleneck while testing the maximum USB 3.0 transfer speed, with screen recording running in the background, might still not be the right solution for me personally. But if your mobile computing needs are a little lighter than mine, they have nailed a lot of stuff here. The 45 watt-hour battery turned in a solid result at PCMark's recommended brightness setting, although it should be noted, if you want to use it outside, it goes a lot brighter than that. And I didn't realize how much I missed my touchscreen until I did my XPS 15 review without one, which you can check out here, by the way. A one-finger hinge is really hard to do on a device this light without having it feel flimsy, but they nailed that, and Razer's speaker, camera, and microphone quality continues to embarrass their competitors. Attention industry! Notebooks are communication devices, this stuff is important. So good on Razer for at least maintaining their above-average standard here. Which leads us back finally again to the keyboard. Far and away the biggest departure from previous Razer notebooks, and everyone else for that matter. The layout with two function keys, six full rows, a great size considering the screen size, and a sensible keycap font this time around, is IMO perfect. Except for the half-height up and down arrows, those still bother me. And it's still fully reconfigurable with remapping and macros using synapse. But now, it's RGB as well, so you can actually change things like color, you can add canned patterns and effects to it, you can change the effects and patterns for different applications, including games with both first and third party tools, and just generally personalize the device in a way that hasn't been done on a laptop before. Freaking awesome. There are however some trade-offs. The new backlighting does not illuminate the whole key the way the old type did, so while the function row lights up when it's activated, the actual functions themselves are not easy to see in the dark, and more importantly, the feel of the switches has been altered very significantly. They are quieter, which some people will appreciate, but they are also less crisp feeling than I'm used to, something that I sincerely hope does not carry over to the new Blade when I review it shortly. To be clear, it didn't slow me down much, but it was not as pleasing to type on, something that I would personally consider more important for a productivity-minded as opposed to a gaming device. Leading us then to the conclusion of today's video. The Blade Stealth takes the ID and the build quality of the Blade 14, which has gotten me, uh, wow, that's a cool black MacBook more than a few times at airport security checkpoints, strips out everything gamer about it, including the video card and even the Bizarroland keycap font in a clear effort to target the mainstream and slashes the price in half. I mean, who saw that one coming from Razer, of all people? But what does that mean then? Would I buy one? Not until Ultrabooks can have quad-core CPUs and 16 gigs of RAM, but would I recommend one to someone in search of an Ultrabook today? You're damn right I would. This is a very compelling answer to the MacBook Air, something even Apple doesn't have right now since they seem to be on a we-don't-need-ports kick. So good work, Razer. This is a great machine, especially for the price. Speaking of good work, let's give a good work to our friends over at dbrand, who no longer are limited to phones and game consoles. Yes, my friends, they now offer skins for Mac and PC laptops, including the Blade Stealth. So if you're kind of going, oh wow, gee Linus, that white one is really cool, how do I get my hands on some of that, or what if I wanted a different color? Head over to the link in the video description, dbrand.com, and you can use their configurator to try out all kinds of different combinations of different colors and textures of skins to get your device looking exactly the way you want it. Their skins fit like a freaking glove, like seriously, no one would know looking at this that you've put a vinyl skin on it as opposed to it shipping out of the factory like that, and they're affordable and they ship worldwide. So check it out at the link in the video description if you want to make your device more scratch resistant, if you want to make it look cooler, and you don't want to spend a ton of money doing it. They're the guys to go to. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon, the instructions up there, by buying a cool shirt like this one, or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum. Now that you're done doing that stuff, you're probably wondering, gee, what should I watch next? And that's a great question. So click on that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video on Channel Superfun, where we play 3D Pictionary. It's like Pictionary, but in 3D with like 3D pens. Much innuendo ensues.