[Leimi]

Sadly I feel like trackpoints are really end of life and I wouldn't be surprised if Lenovo ditched them entirely soon. It seems they keep it only to please the tiny but vocal minority of tinkerers that we are. But we mostly buy old, second hand thinkpads.

And as keyboards get thinner, trackpoints lose in quality. On linux it seems the software side is also not as good as before with libinput.

So I'd be really surprised if any one new on the market would go about making keyboards with trackpoints now.

[cduzz]

There's a trope in car nerd circles of "We all know the best vehicle is a manual transmission brown diesel station wagon" and then of course these people only buy one that's 10 years old, so at this point no car company makes such a beast new.

Pre-covid I'd made do with whatever garbage keyboard and garbage monitor $job dumped in front of me, but almost by happenstance I ended up with a 16:10 monitor and an IBM M4-1 keyboard, and surprisingly it is an enormous improvement in work environment and I'm actually somewhat more effective at $job. (And I should have known this -- I "grew up" using IBM F / M or Focus fk-2002 keyboards that these days sell for actual money on the used market; spent a decade in front of enormous tubed workstations, etc, but normalization of deviance is a real thing)

Anyhow -- perhaps with framework's more modular approach they'd be able to make a form factor with more depth in the case to allow for a "real keyboard". Or more likely I'm just asking for a manual transmission station wagon. Safety Yellow please.

[nicoburns]

Apparently the reason nobody makes station wagons new (for the US market) is because the US has a tax on cars and there is a loophole that allows SUVs and pickup trucks to avoids it as they are classified as "light trucks". There are plenty of station wagons made for the european market (although we call them estate cars on this side of the pond).

[hr2016]

>> the best vehicle is a manual transmission brown diesel station wagon

Wow, that's exactly what I own. Manual, diesel, brown, station wagon. 10 years old. Bought new though, still going strong. =)

[tracker1]

I spent over a decade dealing with the mushy keyboards... my preference now is the M-style unicomp, which I use on my work computer... or I'll fall back to a Cherry mx brown switch keyboard, if there's complaints. I use one for my personal desktop too for backlighting.

There's nothing like the feel, and my RSI issues that I was starting to get improved greatly not bottoming out on a sponge for every key tap.

Unfortunately, switched keyboards for laptops are limited and don't have much travel... they do exist and are definitely superior though. Would be a cool option for framework, but not sure how well they fit for clearance, or what kind of switches framework's kb uses... I've been using an M1 air that I had bought before hearing about framework for personal use, but don't use it much... in a few years, will likely buy from framework and hope they're still around.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> they'd be able to make a form factor with more depth in the case

while the company certainly seems interested in providing options, i would strongly suspect that this level of variability would be a step (much) too far.

[mastax]

I'd buy a new station wagon, but I wouldn't pay $70k, or whatever Volvo wants for one.

[Zak]

Sometimes it makes sense to stay in your niche. The Thinkpad is never going to be huge in the consumer market; being marginally thinner probably won't have a big impact in the institutional market; having the only decent pointing stick on the market is a deciding factor for a certain niche.

I'm trying to decide whether my next laptop will be a Framework or a Thinkpad. If the Framework was available with a pointing stick, the decision would be made. If the Thinkpad wasn't, the decision would be made. The other things that have attracted me to Thinkpads are repairability and Linux support, but Framework does those better.

I'm on my sixth Thinkpad, and there are definitely more out there with the same preferences.

[rjh29]

FWIW Lenovo has promised they won't remove them.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-promises-TrackPoint-wil...

They removed it from the ThinkPad X1 Fold and got enough negative feedback that it was reintroduced in the ThinkPad X1 Fold 16.

What wouldn't surprise me is that they fuck up the trackpoint (e.g. by making it thinner). The Z16 laptop has a newer TrackPoint without dedicated keys, for example, and the newer T14s have flat keys.