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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely surprised it doesn't have a touchpad. I don't think I've ever seen a laptop without one, and I used laptops back in the early/mid 90's.

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It has the TrackPoint, which is sort of a famous love/hate feature. (I love it.)

The ThinkPad is my favorite all-time laptop design. No surprise to me that the author is still using it after getting his MacBook back from the shop.

The TrackPoint is the Vim of pointing devices. Need a couple thousand hours to get proficient and then everything else is inferior.

I have a trackpoint on my HP EliteBook G7, but they didn't include a middle button. So there's no way to scroll without using the scrollbar. I have to wonder if there's a patent reason or something because it seems like such a huge oversight.

The Dells at my work have a terrible Trackpoint with middle-button scroll, but it sucks badly. You have to hit the middle button, then scroll, or perhaps the other way around. Ultra-frustrating, and probably bad firmware or driver design. I'm sure the Trackpoint is a third-class citizen for Dell.

I used to love it, back when Thinkpads still had real buttons to go with it. Then they replaced them with trackpad clicking, which makes using it a pain, because it'd usually register movements besides the click, completely defeating the best feature of the TrackPoint, it's pixel-perfect precision. It was never as quick to use as a mouse, of course, but I could always position the cursor exactly where I wanted before clicking.

There's no such thing as a Thinkpad without a Trackpoint and proper buttons.

The second or third gen X1Carbon used a clickpad. And an LCD bar for the F1-F12 keys. The two design decisions were reversed in the next iteration of the laptop.

And the designer was fired and got a new job at Apple.

The T440? They had to revert it for the next generation (T450).

Great. Now they can go back to my buying list.

There were a couple of those in my last job. But apparently they reverted to having proper buttons.

Alas, the L series thinkpads have the trackpoint but rely on the trackpad for clicking. Nice fast machines that have good battery life (e.g L440) but...

Ah yes, the "randomly click on the screen while typing G or H" device. I always pulled that off mine. Didn't love that tapping it produced a mouseclick.

You can turn off tap-to-click (and I strongly recommend doing just that). Other than that it's the best pointer input device, though.

My x200 doesn't have a trackpad but the next model came with one. The space available for a trackpad is not much so I'm guessing they ditched the trackpad so that they didn't have to sacrifice keyboard real estate.

The keyboard on an x200 is one of the nicest I've ever used for a laptop of that size (12.1" display). It covers as much horizontal space as possible so you get keys that not only have a proper amount of area to not hit two keys at once but have a proper aspect ratio.

The laptop comes with a trackpoint instead which after dailying that x200 for most of my school career, I've come to love and use it on any laptop I come across.

I've used (and owned, although I bought it when it was well past obsolete) laptops without any pointing devices. Early on, trackballs were common. I personally think the ergonomics of the keyboard at the edge of the computer with a trackball hanging off the side are way better than the huge reach we have to make over a modern trackpad (or even the sizable reach on the ThinkPads in this thread). But I don't have the patience to build a frankenlaptop with an older shell and something reasonably modern inside.

> I don't think I've ever seen a laptop without one, and I used laptops back in the early/mid 90's.

Were you using PowerBooks? Touchpads were unusual in laptops until about 2000, when things started going downhill. All of the 1990s laptops I used that I can remember (IBM, Toshiba, Compaq) had superior pointing devices: trackpoint or trackballs.

Are you counting trackballs as touchpads? E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100

I always found the trackball more usable than the touchpad ...

Yea same. The thinkpad I had from 2004 had a trackpad. Maybe the trackpad was optional?

At the time X61s was notably smaller and more expensive than its competitors and other models in the Thinkpad lineup. The "normal-sized" model T61 has both touchpad and Trackpoint, so leaving touchpad out may have something to do with the case dimensions. Maybe there were no space left for it or it would have been awkwardly positioned when using keyboard or Trackpoint, and on a more "special" model leaving it out has been a valid option. After all, T61 was available for customers absolutely requiring the touchpad.

The lack of a trackpad has to deal with not compromising space for the keyboard.

Ah yea, I did have a T series. Thanks for the info.

Probably an over-summary but basically correct: the X series optimised portability and only had a trackpoint, while the T series optimised fully-featuredness and had both trackpoint and trackpad.

I still fire up my T61 from time to time -- it's the only computer in the house that still has a DVD drive.

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