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Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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