CES 2017 - As this year's CES wraps up, some bad news came from the CEO of Razer, Min-Liang Tan. He posted on Facebook that two of their prototypes were stolen from their booth at CES 2017.
While it is extremely difficult to steal a prototype, if they were tearing down the booth it's entirely possible those prototypes could have been stolen. It wouldn't be the first time someone copied a Razer product.
At the show, Razer showed off two new prototypes, the Project Ariana and Project Valerie. Ariana is a projection system that is designed to make gaming more immersive by projecting lower resolution game content over the high-resolution TV or monitor. Project Valerie was the most ambitious project where Razer's engineers managed to squeeze three 4K G-Sync monitors into a single laptop, quite the engineering feat.
While we don't know exactly what was stolen, I would suspect that the Project Valerie laptops would probably have more value than the Project Ariana projector. Rumors indicate that there were two of each prototype at the show, so it's really quite hard to know what was stolen. Razer's CEO just posted a statement on Facebook saying:
I've just been informed that two of our prototypes were stolen from our booth at CES today. We have filed the necessary reports and are currently working with the show management as well as law enforcement to address this issue. At Razer, we play hard and we play fair. Our teams worked months on end to conceptualize and develop these units and we pride ourselves in pushing the envelope to deliver the latest and greatest. We treat theft/larceny, and if relevant to this case, industrial espionage, very seriously - it is cheating, and cheating doesn't sit well with us. Penalties for such crimes are grievous and anyone who would do this clearly isn't very smart. If you were at the show and/or if you can provide us any information, please do reach out to us at legal@razerzone.com - all information provided will be kept in the strictest of confidence.