Razer’s Cage-Like Mouse Is a $280 Goth-Metal Jewel

Razer never could being accused of subtle branding. From pulsing RGB-backlit keyboards, laptops and mice to flashing face masks adorned with lights, the gaming hardware company has geared its entire vibe towards a sense of swanky opulence.

Enter the new mouse from Razer, the Viper Mini Signature Edition. It’s actually a bit muted by Razer standards, with the kind of tasteful aesthetic you might see on the cover of an industrial metal album. The back of the cursor conveyor is an open mesh of triangular and trapezoidal shapes made from lightweight magnesium alloy. It is currently available in one color option which is black.

This little gothic thunderdome looks like it would fit perfectly on the desks of aspiring Bond villains and German kinetic sculptors anywhere, provided they’re willing to pay a handsome price for the privilege: the mouse costs $280.

Although the Viper Mini has a bold look, it’s actually quite small. The magnesium body makes it lighter than any other Razer mouse. It reportedly weighs around 49 grams (1.7 ounces), which is certainly lighter than any of Razer’s other fairly hefty input devices. It connects to your PC via Bluetooth, and the company says the mouse has around 60 hours of battery life.

Razer is taking orders for the Viper Mini mouse on February 11th and should ship shortly thereafter. But again, it’s $280.

Here’s some other consumer tech news from this week.

Twitter twists some arms

Twitter, as you may have noticed, has been struggling to make money after the whims of its cranky new overlord alienated many of the site’s advertisers.

To keep the lights on, Twitter is trying to squeeze some cash out of its increasingly destabilized platform by converting another of its formerly free features into a paid service. Twitter says basic access goes to its API behind a paywall on February 9th. An acronym for Application Programming Interface, an API is a set of tools that software developers use to access a platform’s data; It is essential to build services on Twitter. This means that any third-party accounts or services that rely on the platform’s free backend tools to automate posts to their feeds are forced to either pay a monthly fee or abandon the API and post manually.

Twitter currently offers developers free and paid tiers. The company hasn’t said how much basic access to its API will cost once the free tiers are phased out.

This might not be a big deal for casual users, but it could be a huge headache for accounts that offer unofficial user services. For example, Thread reader app uses Twitter’s API to organize long threads into a single readable post on demand. It responds to thousands of user requests per day in seconds. Doing something like this by manually posting is nearly impossible.

Twitter and Elon Musk themselves justify the move by saying it will deter scammers from abusing the platform’s API. Thing is, scammers whose whole thing is scamming people out of their money will probably happily trade a few of their stolen bucks for the privilege of staying here. Unfortunately, popular and mostly benevolent bot accounts like Thread Reader or whoever you remember are stop doom scrolling are less likely to stay, and many have already indicated that they will be shut down when API restrictions take effect.