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Comment by juiceandjuice | Hacker News Reader

You know, it's not in the same class as a macbook air, but my Thinkpad x61s has been my tiny performant champ for 4 years now. Roughly the size of the netbooks of the time, but tons more power than a netbook and the initial macbook air means it's still powerful enough for anything I throw at it. The one bummer has been screen resolution, but I still get 6 hours battery life on it (I did have to replace the battery once), and it was just a bit over three pounds with the larger battery.

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I will say that Apple did a good job on the screen resolution of the Air line, although the lack of 8gb option for memory is a pain.

My biggest problem with non-Apple "ultrabooks" (thx Intel) is the weird off-center keyboard / touchpad. It is really hard to find a keyboard / touchpad that is actually centered. Never-mind Sony putting a numeric keypad on theirs. How am I supposed to sit centered to the screen and type properly? It looks like that thinkpad is centered but it is so hard to tell with the angled shots.

I also have the x61s, there is no touchpad on that model, just the trackpoint. Which, by the way, is centered.

My dream laptop would be a macbook air with a trackpoint and top notch linux support... I am curious to see what x230 will look like.

t430u looks promising as well.

edit: found a "leaked" photo of the x230. http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/X230-p...

And a real Delete key (not Backspace).

Fn + Backspace (but I guess you knew that)

Control + D works nearly everywhere as well. Incidentally, now I really miss the Fn + arrow for pg up/home/end/pg down when I use a full size keyboard.

I do but it's just not as efficient.

Thinkpad x120e here, the touchpad is centered if that helps at all.

That looks like a winner. Saw a bunch of HPs and Acers that have a weird offset. Nice to see some company actually has people who type working there.

How do you get by with the trackpoint/trackpad? (my current thinkpad has both)... my experience has been that the trackpoint still (to this day over a dozen+ years after it was introduced) still exhibits ghost motion, and the trackpads on PCs all still suck at palm rejection and responsiveness while typing.

When I want an super-portable laptop in "lap mode", I need the pointing device that doesn't suck. The only one that delivers is the Macbook. With all my PCs I've needed to connect a mouse for decent productivity, which really sucks for portability.

> ... and the trackpads on PCs all still suck at palm rejection and responsiveness while typing.

FWIW: this is not a hardware problem. This is an issue with trackpad drivers on PCs, which have been shit since the dawn of time.

I'm typing this from a MacBook Pro running Arch. It took me quite some time to configure the trackpad so that it was comfortable and half-usable. There's a driver for X called "mtrack"[1] which handles clickpads (i.e, where the entire trackpad surface is a button) properly. It's a more configurable fork of the "multitouch" driver that comes with most popular Linux distros these days. It does tap-to-click, tap and drag, drag lock and multitouch just fine. mtrack's palm detection is better than most trackpad drivers, but still not perfect, which is why I ended up having to turn off tap-to-click entirely because I'd get accidental mouse input while typing even with the trackpad sensitivity turned way down.

Now my trackpad works great. I still can't use guestures, though, because (1) X has shitty guesture support and (2) the GNOME folks haven't yet added guestures to Shell. The situation will (hopefully) be fixed with a future release of X and GNOME. I did get some guestures working using an unholy combination of xbindkeys, xdo and a Python script, but it wasn't worth it.

If you're running Windows on your MacBook and using Apple's drivers, you're fine. OTOH, if you're using a non-Apple notebook running Windows and your trackpad vendor doesn't give a fuck about writing good drivers, you're totally and utterly screwed.

This same trackpad works flawlessly on OS X. Clearly, the folks at Apple have spent a lot of time analyzing trackpad input patterns and determined the types of input that should be ignored.

[1] https://github.com/BlueDragonX/xf86-input-mtrack

Oh boy. We really need to push this into X as soon as possible. Not only it would make using Linux on Apple hardware halfway decent, it could also help pretty much every other laptop out there.

Personally, I use keyboard shortcuts whenever possible, making the mouse less necessary. I will now hit 'reply' using a keyboard shortcut

yep, after you use the clitmouse of a loooong time (mostly after I play a round of league of legends) and you try to move the cursor just slightly, it will ghost a little down or up. just pressing the red cap once will stop it until after the next game session.

but it's a damn small price to pay for the clitmouse.

no self respecting programmer should use any other mouse device. my bottom touchpad is configured in X to be 100% scrolling

> my bottom touchpad is configured in X to be 100% scrolling

hey, that's a good good idea. i have always just had mine disabled. thanks!

no self respecting programmer should use any other mouse device.

Besides, perhaps, a proper mouse?

The trackpoint is very cool in that you don't have to move your hand, but extended use can become very uncomfortable.

My wife has the same problem ;)

>no self respecting programmer should use any other mouse device. Hmm... I find the touchpad nothing but a pain. but that may be becoz of my hand position while typing. it keeps shifting the cursor. But other than that, i have developed a distaste towards reaching for the mouse. sometimes it's absolutely necesary, but i am on a mission to setup software to use my computer mouse-free. (i.e switching to a tiling window manager,etc..) but looks like that's too hard/unnatural

I am using my laptops for more than 10 years without a mouse. I am so happy about this decision that I made ago - it is definitely possible and gives a boost of productivity and if you are traveling you do not need to care with you a mose. But it comes with a dependency - all my laptops need a trackpoint, and the best ones by far are on thinkpads. Before going mouse free I had to learn blind-typing (10 fingers, without looking at the keyboard). Then I started to learn VI(M) as editor and at some point it became so unnatural to move the hands from the keyboard that I started to use less and less the mouse until I realized that I do not need it at all.

I already do blind-typing and infact the unnaturalness of reaching for mouse is what makes me wanna go mouseless. I really haven't tried thinkpad after i moved to blind-typing. and sometimes do wish for it. Am curious How big of a dependency can a trackpoint become?? am i just naive to think keyboard operations should be sufficient enough??

touchpad IS PAIN!

that's why i said clitmouse, not touchpad.

my touchpad was ignored until i transformed it in a square-scroll-wheel.

that's a clitmouse http://www.clickykeyboard.com/2005/trackpoint/14288_classicd...

> my bottom touchpad is configured in X to be 100% scrolling

How exactly did you set this up? I tried Googling for it, but nothing relevant came up.

You want to remap the axis. This may help.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_configure_the_TrackPoin...

I feel that no self-respecting person would use that term, especially on the semi-professional HN site. It's distracting from your technical advice and overly dismissive opinion of people who do things differently from you.

I'm working on modding some Thinkpads (X61, X121e, possibly X220 if the price works out) and selling them with Ubuntu pre-installed and fully tested. If anyone's interested, please sign up here - http://giniji.com/ubuntu_laptops.html.

What are you modifying on them besides the operating system?

The hardware spec will be better - SSDs, maxed out RAM - and at a better price than Lenovo offers.

The machines will be fully tested to make sure important things like graphics work well, battery life is maintained and suspend/wake works reliably.

You will also be able to choose your desktop (Unity, Gnome, KDE, XFCE) and ask for additional software to be installed (like Dropbox, not Norton Anti Virus ;-).

Please check back on the site next week and the full product details will be up.

If it weren't for the brightness (no LED backlight) issue, I would have a stockpile of Thinkpad X61s in my closet because I would want to use that machine forever. As it is I'm terrified that something will happen to my X200s and I won't be able to buy anything without a 16:9 screen.

yeah the x200 series was a step up in the display. I had gotten the high brightness screen on the x61s which meant that it wasn't as horrible as the other one.

I've dropped my x61s three or four times now from substantial heights, and a little bit of the plastic is cracked and lately it seems like the cables to the screen might be getting sketchy, but after I pulled apart all the keys and cleaned it out really good a couple of weeks ago it still feels (and looks) new. It's the perfect laptop for traveling at this point, enough power and battery life and low enough weight for anything, but it's old enough that if something happened to it, it wouldn't be devastating.

While learning my way around arch, I got a very cheap second hand "Let's note" panasonic notebook[1]. The screen is, admittedly, pretty naff but as a small lug around which I don't care too much about, it does its job admirably. Debating whether it's worth it to stick an SSD in it now I splurged and got a macbook air..

[1]http://panasonic.jp/pc/

You're giving me curiosity. What model did you get, when did you get it, and how much did it cost?

Uh oh! Haha.. It's a cf-r4 I got for under 15000 yen off of Yahoo auction Japan because it didn't have a charger. Went to akihabara and got a replacement..

Photo: http://instagr.am/p/ZEKYG/

I swear by this model too. Just swap out the drive for a decent ssd!

This will even bring an X41 back to life.

I think this year's macbook air refresh from apple based on Intel's newest Sandy Bridge cpus will be Lege-wait_for_it-Dairy :)

nobody is immune to marketing. Not even linus torvald.

thinkpads are ok (if you stay in the T series) and asus eeepc1000 was years ahead of any mac at the time. heck the air is a copy of that machine with a less plastic-ey case.

but neither asus nor lenovo buy billboards in times square and hollywood blvd, or center fold wired.

anyone that swears to buy apple after researching for the best is just a sad victim of marketing. Sadder as they will never accept it.

eeepc1000 are terrible and have nothing in common with MBAs (not even first generation).

>anyone that swears to buy apple after researching for the best is just a sad victim of marketing. Sadder as they will never accept it.

The quality is not about the cpu/ram/hd specs (which are mighty fine in the MBA). Are those other computers as thin? As light? Some are? Cool. Are those also made of a solid chunk of aluminum? No? Bad. Do they have the highest quality touchpad? No? Bad. Do they feature a very usable "chicklet" keyboard? No? Bad? Do they have the same resolution and display quality? No?

But it's telling you say that "air is a copy of" eeepc1000. It's nothing like eeepc1000. Actually all the "media pundits" were waiting and asking Apple to produce a netbook like it, and they never did, they made the MBA.

The eeepc1000 was a terrible, terrible device. I have one in my closet. The Airs of the time were/are considerably better.

I got a free eeepc1000, hated it and couldn't even give it away. Awful, awful device.

I did all my coding one one for about 3 years. Amazing little computers.

i blame the OS you were using. honestly.

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