Razer could never accused of sophisticated branding. From vibrating keyboards, RGB backlits, laptops and mice to flashing, decorative lighting maskThe gaming hardware company has created its entire vibe around a sense of ostentatious luxury.
Enter Razer’s new mouse, Signature Edition Viper Mini. By Razer’s standards, it’s actually a bit subdued, with the kind of elegant aesthetic you might find on the cover of an industrial metal album. The back of the pointer conveyor is a triangular and trapezoidal open mesh made of light magnesium alloy. It currently has one color option, which is solid black.
This little gothic thunderdome looks like a perfect fit on the desks of aspiring Bond villains and German kinetic sculptors everywhere, as long as they’re willing to pay big bucks for it. Get the perks: The mouse costs $280.
Although the Viper Mini has a bold appearance, it is actually quite small. The magnesium body makes it lighter than any other Razer mouse. It is said to weigh around 49 grams (1.7 ounces), lighter than any of Razer’s other fairly powerful input devices. It connects to your PC via Bluetooth, and the company says the mouse has about 60 hours of battery life.
Razer will take pre-orders for the Viper Mini mouse on February 11th and will ship shortly thereafter. But again, it’s $280.
Here’s some more consumer tech news from this week.
Twitter twisted some arms
Twitter, as you may have noticed, is currently struggling to make money because the whims of its fickle new lord have scared many of the site’s advertisers into flight.
In an attempt to Keep the lights on, Twitter is looking to monetize its increasingly unstable platform by turning another previously free feature into a paid service. Twitter says basic access to its API is happening behind a charge wall on Feb. 9. Short for application programming interface, an API is a set of tools that software developers use to access a platform’s data; it’s essential to building services on Twitter. This means that any third-party account or service that relies on the platform’s free backend tools to automatically post on their feed will be forced to pay a monthly fee or from drop the API and post manually.
Twitter now offers developers free and paid tiers. The company has yet to say how much basic access to its API will cost after the free tiers go away.
This may not seem like a big deal to the average user, but for accounts that provide unofficial user services it can be a huge headache. For example, Topic reading application uses Twitter’s API to organize long strings into a single readable post on request. It responds in seconds to thousands of user requests every day. Doing anything like that by manually posting is nearly impossible.
Twitter and Elon Musk himself are justifying the move by saying it will prevent scammers from abusing the platform’s API. The thing is, the scammers, whose whole act is extorting people’s money, will probably be happy to hand over some of their stolen dollars for the privilege of staying. Unfortunately, popular and mostly benevolent bot accounts like Thread Reader or the remind you account stop doomscrolling are less likely to exist, and many have indicated that they will stop working once the API restrictions go into effect.
