Comment by quanto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quanto | Hacker News Reader

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The real tragedy is the omission of top TrackPad buttons.

Middle-click paste is widely used in Linux, and while I tried mouse emulators with limited success, it sure is good to have a physical button at your thumb. With a tiling window manager, you can copy (by visual select depending on the application) and paste (middle-click) without ever leaving your home row across multiple windows. This is a serious work flow tool in REPL.

Moreover the new haptic feedback they got on button-less TrackPads have motors etc which are not as reliable as million-click-tested ThinkPads' physical buttons.

Laptops are the tools of our trade, and unfortunately, we cannot make too many compromises, especially for the sake of trendy aesthetics. If ThinkPads want to be MacBooks, then we might as well buy MacBooks; indeed, many of us already do. Almost a decade ago, Lenovo already made a similar mistake with 2nd generation Carbon X1 (and some T series) and they had to revert back. Having a diversity in the market place is important, and I surely hope Lenovo keeps ThinkPads as uniquely performant as they have been since the IBM days.

I use middle-click paste VERY heavily in day-to-use of my laptop. It's getting hard to find a laptop that still has a middle button at ALL. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when they finally remove it. (The constant march toward design minimalism means this is a matter of WHEN not IF.)

Also, F Dell for not putting power/sleep lights on their laptops anymore. It was the only reliable of way of knowing whether its safe for me to put my laptop in the bag without cooking itself to death.

> Also, F Dell for not putting power/sleep lights on their laptops anymore.

Yes! It makes me crazy that product designers continue removing helpful LED indicators users rely on - all to maybe a save couple pennies per unit. Other offenders are power supply bricks not having a small LED lit when it's receiving power and Ethernet switches not having RJ-45 sockets with the standard-forever dual orange/green indicators. Sometimes power bricks are on extension cords or power strips which get turned off or kicked loose. Yes, users could open the laptop, log in and finish some pending Windows update just to confirm it's still charging. But that's stupid.

Just this week I needed a cheap, generic 5-port unmanaged switch and almost clicked buy without noticing they'd used connectors without indicators. I quickly found another unit with all the same features and (probably) the same chip and board, which did have LEDs - and it was $5 less! Yes, I could walk to wherever the cable goes to check that the device is on, active and what speed it's at but that's stupid.

Relatedly, there is a lesser circle of hell reserved for product designers of consumer devices intended for daily desktop or nighttime bedside use, like wireless phone charging stands, who put an LED on it that is so fucking BRIGHT it could give a sunburn. Some of them go for extra credit by making the Lighthouse of the Gods BLINK like aircraft landing lights - when indicating normal use - not an exception state.

Until last year, when it broke, I had a Dell that seems to be from 2012 (Latitude E5530, but I might have gotten one of the numbers wrong), albeit refurbished and with more RAM. It was bulky and didn't have a lot of RAM (half as much as my current laptop), but it had its advantages over my current, newer, laptop, like feeling sturdier and more secure (my current laptop has a little grate over what looks like part of the motherboard, which feels weird; doesn't that make it super easy for stuff to get in?), a DVD drive, and that beautiful middle-click button, which also makes it easier to figure out the dividing line between left and right click.

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