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Comment by vinay427 | Hacker News Reader

Ha, meanwhile I wouldn't buy a ThinkPad (or any other laptop) without it.

As for your question, I've never heard of at least the "real" ThinkPad series laptops (X/W/T/...) sold without the TrackPoint. Does it really bother you when typing? If it's the appearance, you can likely find a black nib for purchase or maybe remove the included nib and blacken it out.

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Same. Once I learned how to use it, I can't go back.

Recently my work laptop was switched to a Dell without the nub and I noticed reduced workflow immediately.

I grew up a fan of the track point, back when trackpads were either nonexistent or hot garbage (at least on PC laptops). Which is to say I definitely “learned how to use it”. Then I switched to Mac laptops a decade ago. Since then I’ve got to touch the track point a few more times and it felt so dated. People still tout the precision, but I can get the same level of precision on a quality trackpad, plus much needed fluidity in general, not to mention multitouch gestures.

For me, it's not about precision. With the Trackpoint I can rest my hands on the Keyboard/Homerow and I can use the pointer without having to move my hands at all.

That’s fair. I personally don’t mix typing and trackpad usage very much so that advantage is pretty minimal for me.

I think the advantage is bigger than you believe, and I would bet you mix typing/trackpad more than you believe also.

Could be, but I’m positive that I use gestures more than I mix typing/trackpad, so there’s that.

Overall I think you'd still be faster in keyboard, but gestures and such offer a lot in terms of simplicity which is a fair trade a lot of the time. If your workflow revolves around typing however, I would still put trackpoint above.

As the other commenter said, the benefit comes from keeping your fingers on home-row, not precision.

I had to disable the track point in the BIOS of my X1 carbon 5th Gen, otherwise it would completely freeze the OS on Ubuntu 18.04.

I never found a solution for this. I hope they fixed it in the newer gens.

The touchpad was also really annoying when I had to select and scroll.

Apart from that it was a fine laptop, but IMO the XPS 13 is a bit better.

I'd have to try. It seems really awful from a typing perspective, but everyone's different.

It's excellent for typing, you don't need to leave home row

But....isn't it for the mouse? Why do you use your mouse while typing?

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