Razer is the latest tech brand to be hit by an internet storm of bad PR. Multiple videos from at least two major tech channels have been posted criticising the gaming laptop specialist's products and services, including the latest Razer Blade 16, with issues including faulty trackpads, glitchy software, and poor customer support.
Let's begin with Gamers Nexus, which has become something of a self-appointed arbiter of business ethics in the gaming hardware industry. In an upload titled "How Razer Screws Customers," host Stephen Burke lays out a litany of complaints and issues.
Many of the issues reported revolve around Razer's Synapse software. That includes trackpads that are intermittently unresponsive and keyboards that generate double keypresses.
Regarding the trackpad, GN reports on a Reddit poll with 106 total votes showing 41 owners of 2025 Blade laptops experiencing issues with their trackpad. Such polls tend to be biased towards users with issues. People don't tend to jump on Reddit to report that everything is working fine. But, equally, that particular problem does seem to be more than just one or two isolated customers.
GN also reports on one Redditor who posted a video that seems to show the Synapse software reducing frame rate performance in several games on a Blade 16 with an RTX 5090 GPU, including: Control, League of Legends, Dota 2, Ghost Watchers and more.
The Redditor explains that Synapse running results in an FPS loss upon any mouse movement, but that you must have Synapse running before you launch a game in otherwise the RTX 5090 is limited to 120 W. For now, we're only aware of a single report of this particular issue, which the user says is related to the polling rate of the mouse being used, conflicting with Razer's Synapse software.
Further issues include problems concerning external displays dropping in and out intermittently, various crashes and BSODs and very poor performance on battery power. Rounding things out are reports of poor customer support.
GN says that Asus remains the "number one complaint" in their inbox, "Razer is also pretty high up in that list." According to GN, the issues concerning customer support boil down to what you might call heel-dragging. It's claimed Razer customer support forces users to spend hours or days fruitlessly reinstalling operating systems and other software on brand new systems when a simple replacement might have been more appropriate.
Anyway, this particular PR storm probably dates back to Just Josh's review of the new Razer Blade 16, titled "Razer Blade 16: Atrociously Buggy", in which he asserts that, "Razers are consistently the buggiest laptops of any that I've tested. And this one it is really bad."
Just Josh has since done a follow-up video on the broader issues of Razer laptop bugs and poor customer support titled "Razer's Support - A Train Wreck!". That video recounts the poor experience the channel had with a $4,000 Razer Blade the channel itself bought and was suffering trackpad and keyboard issues, some of which are catalogued on this Reddit thread.
Just Josh reports on a convoluted and frustrating experience trying to get Razer to RMA the laptop for repair or replacement, in which the channel went through no fewer than 12 different support reps. The whole process to get the laptop replaced took 36 days.
In the end, there are two sides to this story. While it's certainly true that plenty of tech companies fall short when it comes to tech support, the argument with Razer is that it attaches premium pricing to its products. When you're paying $4,000 or perhaps even more for a laptop and you have problems shortly after purchase, you might expect swift resolution.
The other side to the story is that all tech products have problems, and it's people experiencing those problems that appear on web forums, not all the happy Razer owners. For our part, we didn't experience any of those issues with our early sample of the Razer Blade 16, nor with the Blade 14, which has been getting more long-term testing as a daily driver machine.
All that said, the key to all of this is arguably customer support.
Even if Razer is having some issues with its latest 2025 Blade laptops, good customer support goes a long way to mitigating that. And it does seem like there is cause to at least question how good Razer's customer support is, currently. We'll be watching with interest how this one unfolds, that's for sure.
