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The original patents on track point ran out years ago. Even dell has a (not great) version in some of their laptops.

There could very well be some new patents on Lenovo’s recent stuff for whatever reason, but there’s nothing stopping anybody from copying what IBM put out.

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Dell and HP and Toshiba all had pointing sticks on their professional laptops even before the patents ran out. They were utter shit of course because it was negative inertia which made the TrackPoint usable and that was patented and by the time it expired everyone was high on trackpads which are , once again, obviously utter shit because they can not be as efficient as a TrackPoint which is where your fingers are compared to a trackpad where you need to move your hand to.

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