$380,000: The Price Razer Paid For A Green USB Port On The New Blade Laptop

$380,000: The Price Razer Paid For A Green USB Port On The New Blade Laptop

Razer released the yearly iteration of the Blade, its extremely thin laptop with a respectable amount of gaming power under the hood. Razer spent a lot of money figuring out how to stuff all that power into a sleek MacBook-like body. In fact, the company spent $380,000 alone redesigning the standard USB port to better fit the overall design.

The first Blade released last year to mixed reviews. In the end, the Blade turned out more like a MacBook Pro than a gaming rig. It wasn’t a poor choice for a portable gaming computer – and was at least the best choice for a gaming laptop if minimal thickness was your top priority — but there were better choices available. Now, Razer released the newest iteration with many improvements, such as a full 1080p display and an Nvidia GTX 870M graphics card. By taking traditionally bulky gaming laptops and transforming them into the MacBook-thin Blade — complete with a similar hinge, trackpad, keyboard, and display (though the 2014 Blade has a touchscreen) — Razer focused heavily on the design and aesthetics of the body, which is perhaps why the original Blade was underwhelming. One area Razer spent quite a bit of time attempting to redesign was the standard USB port. In fact, a significant amount of money was spent as well, to the tune of $380,000.

Perhaps indicative of either the high standards to which Razer holds pure aesthetics, or — as various PC gamers claim — indicative of Razer’s focus on aesthetics instead ofperformance, the company didn’t actually change the USB hardware, but instead simply spent all that money changing its color.

If you look at the USB ports on your laptop, desktop, or tablet, you’ll notice a little plastic piece inside the port — the nightmare plastic that makes it so difficult to plug in a USB cable without first looking at its orientation. If you felt the need to pay attention to the coloring of this plastic piece, you’d notice that there’s something of an unofficial standard. USB 3.0 ports, for instance, tend to run with a blue plastic piece, while black or white are the common colors for USB 2.0. Certain companies choose a custom color; Apple’s plastic piece, for instance, is some kind of off-white. You also might notice a red or yellow piece, which generally signifies a port that can charge a device while the computer is powered off. Whereas Apple’s iconic colors are white, black, and grey, Razer’s iconic colors are black and acidic green. So, to jibe with Razer’s heavy focus on uniform aesthetics, the little plastic piece needed to be the brand’s iconic bright green — a color in which those pieces didn’t yet exist.

Razer couldn’t just shoot off an email to the company that manufactures the pieces, kindly asking to now make some exclusive green ones that it couldn’t sell to other companies. No one has ever made the USB part in that color before, and it’s not just as simple as dumping all the plastic in a vat of paint. Razer sent their own specialists to the manufacturing plant in order to make sure the color was just right, matching the company’s logo, green backlit keyboard, and all of the laptop’s green detailing. Then, once the pieces were the correct shade of green, Razer had to spend time, effort, and money testing them to make sure the color wouldn’t fade with use or over time.

Basically, Razer performed every task a company would perform if they were inventing the pieces for the first time. Research and development, creating prototypes, testing, redesigning when something didn’t work, and so on. The end result was $380,000 worth of a little green plastic piece that, admittedly, pleasantly accents the Blade’s overall aesthetic. No one would bat an eye if the pieces were black, but Razer spent over a third of a million dollars just to make you slightly smile the first time you saw your laptop’s USB port.

The 2014 Razer Blade starts at $2,200 for the standard model, and $2,300 for the Pro.