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Comment by Leimi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>> 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. =)

What is it/where are you?

I can't think of a single vehicle available in the US that fits that description since the 90's.

Yes, I'm living in Iceland. Our car market is quite a mix. It's mostly European/Asian commuters but also with plenty of bigger US cars, mostly pickups.

My specific model is a Renault Megane Estate.

That makes sense!

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.

It looks as though, to make the framework taller to support keys with travel, you'd need an entirely different case -- but so long as the mountpoints for everything were otherwise the same it seems like it wouldn't be a radical rework of the product.

One can imagine a double thickness framework with either somewhat bigger battery and mechanical keys or super huge battery and the smaller keys; and of course more (or at least larger) expansion cards.

But of course the idea for something is worthless - it's the execution that matters. I hope they succeed enough to be able to expand their portfolio to more niche markets.

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).

In my state, SUVs are classified as station wagons.

I think station wagons just mostly went out of style. I think it's dumb but the American public has always gravitated towards physically bigger and bigger cars, to the point where it's considered totally normal to commute to an office job in a 12 mpg super duty pickup with extended crew cab and duallies in the back.

In the USA the roads are big, the fuel's cheap, and everyone's got a huge vehicle so you need one too to feel safe / be able to see anything; it's an arms race everyone loses.

If you live some place where the SUV's just not going to fit and energy's more expensive, you get the smaller vehicle and everyone else does too.

There are tax rules around huge vehicles in the USA -- you can fully depreciate an enormous work vehicle so there's a surprising number of vehicles that fit just barely into that enormous category.

The only way to get a "manual" these days is to get an electric car. Not exactly a manual, but more like a manual than a slush box.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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