Razer has announced its new lineup of Blade gaming laptops for next year. The Blade 15, once the best gaming notebook and the object of absolute age-old technological desire, will now be coming to an end.

Yes, the Blade 15 and the less popular Blade 17 seem to have been put out to pasture, with only the 14-, 16-, and 18-inch options given a 2024 paint job and new silicone.

"The Blade lineup for 2024 is 14, 16, and 18 inches at this point," a Razer representative told me prior to the CES 2024 reveal.

"I said at this moment," he added, "because there are occasional updates to the Blade lineup that span half a generation, and those updates can be a 0.5 refresh colorway or a different chassis size. But at the moment the 2024 lineup is 14, 16, and 18."

In other words, never say never for the venerable 15-inch Blade, but given that the Blade 16 is roughly the same size chassis-wise but offers a larger screen, it's hard to see where the spot associated with the Blade 15 is any longer.

The Blade 16 seemed like an easy replacement, but I'm almost surprised it took Razer this long to kill it, given its eagerness to keep rolling in the background for the previous generation of mobile silicon. And while the thinner chassis than the larger machines had a certain appeal, it wasn't enough to keep up with the larger bores now that they were getting a whole new refresh.

Even the base model of the new Blade 16 has a new 240Hz OLED panel, with Intel's new Core i9 14900HX Raptor Lake Refresh processor (same but different, I guess), and up to RTX 4090 (mobile version) It can be configured with. The mini-LED screen option from the previous version is still present, as is a dubious dual-mode feature that allows it to run at native 4K resolution or hard reset at 240 Hz non-full HD resolution.

Other than that, this is overall the same machine as last year. Even with the new AMD chip, the Ryzen 9 8945HS, there's nothing major added to the Red Team's Ryzen 8000 series laptop chips, just as Intel hasn't done much new with its refreshed top-end mobile parts. I don't see that happening.

Also, a refreshed Blade 18 model with the "world's first" 4K 165Hz 18-inch panel is expected by the end of the year. However, I believe this is waiting for Thunderbolt 5 to be fully completed.

_____________________________________ PC Gamer's CES 2024 coverage is courtesy of Asus Republic of Gamers.