New ThinkPad X9 comes without TrackPoint | Hacker News Reader

New ThinkPad X9 comes without TrackPoint

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25 pointsaquir22 comments

The moment the track point is gone is the moment I'll stop buying them.

Obviously, that's one sale, but I'm pretty sure we are a large'ish group. There are, after all, not many vendors offering a track point today, so it is a differentiating factor, and we a captive audience.

Between that and occasionally screwy Linux support, I wonder what their thinking is. Sever all their unique markets and compete evenly against everyone else ? Do they feel Windows offers enough to avoid bleeding sales to Apple ? And what? They feel so confident in what's left of the Thinkpad that they have no reason to fear other vendors ? Interesting. Maybe they know better, but I'd be concerned if I held their stock

Could you please elaborate on _screwy Linux support_ ? I use Linux exclusively and was planning to buy a Thinkpad.

Not OP and not the answer you're looking for, but FWIW I own a ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 (design is kinda similar to the X9) and literally everything works perfectly OOTB. You can even update every piece of updatable firmware from Linux (via fwupd), so there's zero reasons to have a dual-boot Windows on it, if you don't really need it.

Also the best part (for me) is that the BIOS supports Opal2 drive encryption, so you could encrypt your drive without any performance overhead and without having to muck around with LUKS. You could have multiple OSes all installed on the same drive and not have to worry about using different encryption schemes for all of them.

Oh, and all of the device driver functionality is present in the mainline kernel, so there's no need to load a special kernel/modules/drivers like most other so-called "native" Linux laptops (like System76 or Framework). What this means is that you can happily run the latest bleeding edge mainline kernel or any random custom kernel of your choice, and not have to worry about loading extra modules or repos etc. This also means that you can expect pretty much every kernel/OS upgrade to go smoothly. And that has indeed been my experience over the past couple of years that I've owned this laptop for. When you consider that not even Windows users on Surface laptops can claim a 100% bug-free OS upgrade experience, it is a pretty incredible achievement, IMO.

So for me, the ThinkPad is the definitive Linux native laptop. At least, my Z13 is.

I owned a Z13 Gen 1 and it was a horrendous piece of crap. I constantly had crashes, hangs, faulty suspend, keyboard problems, dock problems, audio problems, and so much more from the very beginning.

I very reluctantly purchased a X1 Carbon Gen 12 and am much more satisfied with the Linux implementation.

Sounds like a bad unit to me. Haven't had any such issues on mine, been running Fedora and Arch over the past couple of years.

My Z13 most definitely was defective, although after seeing a few similar cases, I wonder if they had a bad batch or if that was just an unstable platform. Even after getting it serviced (which was a joke, because they don't diagnose Linux machines at the service center even though Lenovo sells them) nothing improved.

Strangely fortunate: it got stolen in Dublin and was covered by insurance.

A few months ago after updating the UEFI firmware on my Thinkpad T14 Gen 4 (Intel), debian 12 bookworm (stable repo - kernel version 6.1) would become unresponsive (desktop freezing, wifi malfunctioning). After updating the kernel to version 6.11 via bookworm backports, the issues were resolved.

Then there's also Firmware missing for most devices on Thinkpad T14 Gen 4 Intel https://github.com/fwupd/firmware-lenovo/issues/358

I have a T14s (AMD) which works very nicely, battery lasts for long 7-8 hours and things generally work.

Before that, I had a P14s Gen1 for work. No matter what, that system runs a bit hot and battery times are awful. I haven't dedicated days to searching for fixes, but that's my point, it used to _just work_, and in this case, it works poorly.

It used to be the case that outside of certain specific setups (like a dual-GPU machine), Lenovo Thinkpads would just work, Ubuntu certified or not. But that P14s G1 really soured my experience. I would advise you to check the return policy, maybe double-check if anyone has blogged about their device.

FWIW I have had many thinkpads over the years, they _mostly_ work well. But there have been more misses as of late.

I will add that I also own a Z13 Gen 1 and that it works well. Albeit the battery drains much faster because of the high-res oled screen. And I do think the palm-rest is a bit uncomfortable, the edges are too sharp, but that's not a Linux issue :D

Join me in into that club, thinkpad without trackpoint no thanks.

Ditto. I bought a new low-end Thinkpad this year (L13 Gen3) and I probably paid $700 for a $500 laptop because I wanted the Trackpoint.

If they want to cede this market, I'll probably have to wait until Framework offers a Trackpoint keyboard drop-in and go there instead.

Call it something other than a ThinkPad... Meanwhile I'm just here trying to get my TeX Yoda II repaired after water spilled on it. Single best I/O device I have ever owned. https://tex.com.tw/products/yoda-ii

I guess I can't say I blame them though. Most people these days don't even know how a trackpoint is meant to be used effectively (i.e. by making aggressive use of mouse acceleration to rough-center the cursor in the area of the screen you want it and then fine tuning).

And of course nobody has satisfactorily solved the problem of drift (that I know of). That is to say, Trackpoints come with drift correction algorithms, but they don't always catch small drifts and sometimes they trigger when you're just making a long constant input, leading to a situation where releasing the input creates its opposite

That shouldn't be so hard to fix. Don't register any pressure if there's no finger touching the TrackPoint (determined by capacitance/pressure or whatever)--similar to how track pads have palm touch rejection.

Lenovo builds a very wide range of laptops and this one is just pirating the ThinkPad moniker severely harming the Thinkpad brand name's reputation. A real Thinkpad by default needs to have a trackpoint to be considered one. If it doesn't have a trackpoint it's not a Thinkpad. Just ignore this and keep to the real Thinkpads.

Not sure if this is new but also notice the keyboard style has changed? Seems more like MacBook style with very low Key Travel ( 1mm ). Sigh I remember Thinkpad and SurfaceBook was the only few sticking to 1.5mm Key Travel.

"Awful" would be a kind description of this keyboard. The bottom two rows are aligned, which is the new anti-ANSI laptop trend. Page up and down are now Fn keys. Insert is a function key. PrtSc is long gone. F key font is miniscule. F keys are no longer grouped (unless you count that tiny fillet as a grouping). I'm willing to bet they still haven't added Alt+MicMute as an alias to Alt+F4 (since virtually nobody in the history of computing has needed a keyboard modifier with the MicMute button). Delete is awkwardly wide. Control is sunken in so you can't press it with the outside of your hand anymore. Up and down arrows share one over-wide key. These look like low-travel chiclets. Of course it has Microsoft branding.

I'm willing to bet the ISO variant of this machine is even dumber, with that key that rides right up against Enter.

I hate the Trackpoint. I shed no tears if it goes. It isn't a pleasant experience in Linux and doesn't save any time over keyboard and touchpad, and the entire subsystem is just more crap to debug and waste energy. On the other hand, the ThinkPad keyboard is the only laptop input I consider decent for heavy terminal use and programming.

...as far as copying Apple? At least Apple had the decency to ditch differently sized arrow key pairs. Unless Lenovo offers large gamut IPS or more than 2 watts of speakers or anything at all special, this is "just another" PC laptop.

Oh no. That’s the biggest reason why I just bought another ThinkPad instead of a comparable other brand.

If I get a new laptop, it must have a trackpoint and the ability to disable the touchpad. If no, will not get. But what I have now is fine and probably fime for many years to come.

Well, then there's no point (heh) in buying one.

It looks fake to me.

But if true, it's not a real thinkpad then.

It's "no True Scott's man"

As someone who used to be a huge Thinkpad fan/user, the Thinkpad brand is dead.

I liked Thinkpads because of trackpoint, linux support, quality builds. 2/3 of those are gone. Linux support is still there, but even the higher end builds have shotty quality at this point. I wanted a quality tool to do quality work.

I switched to mac with the arm conversion. Quality builds with Unix support. Once Aasahi is fully functional, the world will be complete.

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