If you are doing a lot of typing, why move your hand off the keys? Scrolling by holding the middle mouse button with your thumb and just slightly moving the TrackPoint is also a much a nicer experience thank scrolling with any touchpad. Using laptops with only touchpads is always an uncomfortable and inefficient experience to me.

Having more manufacturers of decent laptops with TrackPoints would be great instead of mostly just being beholding to Lenovo.

> fetish object

A tool that I use productively every day is not something I would describe as a "fetish object". I've put years of use into mice, trackpads, and pointing sticks, and I've found pointing sticks to be the most comfortable and efficient tool for me. There are other people who feel differently for any number of reasons, but TrackPoint users are entitled to their preferences just as other people are entitled to theirs. Nobody needs to prove that their preference is "superior" before they buy the product they want.

The only remaining laptop maker that puts a serious effort into implementing pointing sticks into their devices is Lenovo with their ThinkPad lines. Unfortunately, Lenovo has been making negative changes to ThinkPads over the years, such as soldering memory and reducing key travel. This opens up an opportunity for other laptop makers (such as System76) to claim the TrackPoint users who only are only buying ThinkPads because the TrackPoint makes up for the other disadvantages.

I have a laptop with both a trackpoint and a touchpad with physical buttons. I bought it specifically for those buttons, but that's another story. I never use a mouse except once every few years, if I have to try some game. Move and click does not work on a touchpad.

So, I attempted to learn to use the trackpoint but it's too difficult. My hands are already close to the touchpad and very far from the mouse, that's why I don't use a mouse anymore. The incremental benefit to switch from touchpad to trackpoint is very small IMHO. Moving from mouse to trackpoint is probably huge.

You can't really say one is "superior" or even objectively better. Apple's touchpads are <unspecified amount> better than others but I still hate them and would always use a trackpoint (if I can't have a mouse).

Some people swear that trackballs are better than a mouse, can you argue the mouse is superior? It's a question of preference and discussion on this level is kinda pointless.

I’ve used one a long time ago and I did like it. The fact that you don’t have to move your hands off the keyboard is it’s main selling point. Though I’ve adjusted to not having one.

At one point my work mouse had a track point instead of a scroll wheel. That was amazing. To be able to scroll around at different speeds.

To me it's a superior concept with an inferior execution. Perhaps because nobody else does it, so no competition or innovation, like Apple came out with a much better trackpad, were ahead a while, and now it seems mostly levelled.

Yes.