Last Minute SSD Upgrade Delays Razer Blade Shipments to January 2012

We've been chomping at the bit to play with Razer's upcoming Razer Blade gaming notebook ever since it was revealed in August, and like everyone else, it looks like we'll have to wait just a little bit longer to find out if it lives up to the hype. A last minute storage upgrade prompted Razer to delay the release until Janaury 2012.

Razer made the announcement on its Facebook page and split it into good and bad news portions. The good news? Razer decided to yank the 320GB mechanical hard drive and plop a 256GB solid state drive in its place, and do so without raising the price. We already knew about this actually, since Razer CEO Min-Liang Tag broke the news in an interview with Kotaku earlier this month. In any event, Razer says this type of upgrade would generally add anywhere from $300 to $500 on top of the list price if you were to configure a similar upgrade at Dell or Apple.

Ironically, the good news is also the reason for the bad news.

"Because we managed to upgrade the HDD to an SSD at the eleventh hour, we were only able to secure quantities of the new SSDs to arrive at our manufacturing facilities at the last minute and as a result, we will not be able to fulfil our initial launch orders of the Razer Blade before the holidays," Razer said. "We expect to be able to ship our initial quantities of the Razer Blade only in mid to late January for our customers in North America. We will be doing everything humanly possible to bring this date forward if we can."

So there you have it, the Razer Blade won't be under any Christmas trees this month. To make up for the disappointing news, Razer says you can go to the Razer Blade store and sign up at the "Notify Me" button to receive a notification when it ships in 2012, along with a coupon code for a Razer Orochi Blade Edition mouse to include in your order at no additional cost.