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Comment by otalp | Hacker News Reader

Thinkpads are great, I just wish they'd update the design to make it look less 2006ish. Also a bigger trackpad with responsiveness that can compete with the macs. It's been so many years, I don't know why other manufacturers trackpads haven't caught up with Apple's trackpads. Even the XPS one is Meh. I think the surface book comes closest.

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It doesn't look 2006ish, it looks like straight from the 1990s and I love that. And the first thing I do on a Thinkpad is disabling the trackpad.

ThinkPad doesn't need a trackpad, the trackpoint with three mouse buttons underneath are the perfect way of using the computer. No need to move your hands off from the keyboard.

And please, never change the classic black and red design.

How do you use that darn stick accurately and efficiently? :-) It's straight velocity control, there's no position control at all. How do people aim with that?

You get the hang of it pretty quickly by just using it for a few days. I don’t even have a mouse on my desk at work (Desktop + ThinkPad external keyboard), my hands never have to leave the keyboard’s home row :)

I never had any trouble when I discovered the trackpoint.

Issues:

- at least on pre 2010 thinkpads, the sensor may recalibrate weirdly once a week and the pointer will fight you for 2 seconds (annoying but rare enough so you don't smash the laptop)

- Aiming is not very precise, but I'm a keyboard head, so the less movement my wrists do, the better... trackpads are hell for me, and I rarely need precise (by that I mean, photoshop or real time analog control precise) positioning.

Also I find it way easier to drag and drop with a trackpoint, on a trackpad the frontier between single click, long press and drag, release is so thin.. I lost track(sic) of the amount of times I triggered false positives of every cases (who never dragged something while hovering or resting his thumb too close to the pad surface ?)

I find it much more accurate than a trackpad. When I was younger, I actually played some games purely with it. Index finger to control the direction and thumb for the buttons. I have been using thinkpads almost exclusively since 2003 or so though.

About one day of training does the trick.

They have been making the trackpad bigger. But the Apple MacBook trackpads keep getting bigger also, perhaps because a trackpad can never be big enough? Rather than try to copy Apple, I would rather they keep the design as-is.

I meant the feel and responsiveness of the trackpad rather than size.

Almost all of Apple's "responsiveness" advantage is from careful software tuning. You could get a windows trackpad to feel as good as Apple's if you tuned the acceleration curves and added better palm detection.

So why isn’t it done? I think it’s not controversial to say that the trackpads (or “trackpad experience”) on MB*s are just plain superior than anything Windows has access to.

A lot of it is priority; the trackpad working well is a low priority for most manufacturers in the face of other things like better looking benchmarks etc.

That attitude, the holistic view of the experience, is what people are willing to pay more for with Apple, that not everyone values.

You should use one of the newer machines with the precision trackpads. They are pretty good, and keep getting better with windows updates.

I wish they made the trackpad smaller. They used to have (T420 and older) a smaller trackpad and a wonderful 7 row keyboard but they've since switched to a 6 row keyboard to have a bigger trackpad.

That means I'm stuck on the T420s for the foreseeable future.

I’ve got a T430. Had an X201 before that. It took a month to get used to it but I’ll be honest and say that I’m happy with it now. I dismantled it and wedged some paper under the trackpad though to stop it being pressed. That helps.

I feel you. You can look at [0] to use a t430 with the old keyboard and hand rest.

[0] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Classic_Keyboard_on_xx...

I quite like the Thinkpad look. The design is somewhat iconic and it does put function over form (my T450 has a battery butt on the underside, it's ugly as heck but I can work for 8 hours uninterrupted no problem)

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