It's certainly one of those "acquired tastes", though like with 3.5mm elimination, I don't understand the sheer vitriol against it by those who happen not to use it. Why do you care? If everything else in Thinkpad appealed to you, why would an eminently ignorable feature be such a HUGE ("single reason") deal breaker?
In my mind, either a) There are other reasons and this is a convenient conscious or subconscious scapegoat; or b) it's an extremely emotional decision, and as such certainly relevant to holder ("Whatever floats your boat!":) but not necessarily applicable or translatable to anybody else.
I'd be curious (genuinely!) to hear more - were you actually tempted by any Thinkpads in the past but rejected them due to trackpoint, and if so can you elaborate why - what use case did they prevent or what inconvenience did they cause? Thx muchly! :)
Not much against nipple itself, but what about the TWO GIANT physical clicky buttons under the spacebar?
- extra accidental clicks
- steal of space from the touchpad
- more moving parts
- visual clutter
- undermine chassis rigidity
- add weight
- With touchscreen and a good touchpad, there's nothing that justifies its existence.
Oh yeah, they tried removing those in the _40 series (T440, T540, etc) a few generations yet. That went over well! :P
As I frequently mention in this context: You haven't lived until you've seen a highly paid security architect slam their laptop repeatedly in front of the client in frustration :P.
So they put them back in the _50 series and onward :).
Seriously, the generation was reviled and it was a complete rebellion to put them back. And with good reason.
The two "GIANT" (regular sized, but whatever:) physical clicky buttons are there for people who like physical clicky buttons. Which is a large portion of user base using ThinkPads / Lattitude / Elitebooks. These laptops are tools of our trade and we use them at home at work on airplane in coffee shop in the park in the backyard in the bedroom everywhere. We have a fixation for functionality, for positive action and reliable feedback, not design/minimalism.
I have no fantasies that we'll agree, but wanted to provide a perspective to enhance understanding :)
Edit/Update upon thinking: I think indeed there's a market/product for both: people / companies who prefer minimalism (Apple laptops are really the sexiest epitomes of that design aspiration and I'll agree if sleek sexiness is an important criteria, nothing beats them:). And for people / companies who prefer modularity / functionality / expandability / power... I'd love to say that ThinkPads cater to that audience, but in reality they're becoming more like MacBooks - minimalism is clearly winning in the industry, even if there's a backlash in the hardcore but tiny communities :-/
At any rate, it seems we went from "Trackpoint is the single reason against Thinkpad" to "nothing much against trackpoint", which answers my original question I suppose.
The trackpoint is ugly. It's a giant throwback pimple in the middle of the keyboard, which there's no way to get around looking at all the time. Thinkpads being ugly is kind of their thing, so it doesn't surprise me that lots of Thinkpad people don't mind it or even see it as a plus, but to me seeing a trackpoint is like seeing a floppy drive. I used one for years, and I'm really happy that trackpads have gotten good enough that I'll never need to use one again.
Edit: display notches are actually probably a better comparison. They're ugly and even though I don't use it I can't get rid of it except by using hardware designed not to have it.
And "The trackpoint is ugly" is yours. At least he's talking about something relevant: usability. If you refuse to use a keyboard because it's "ugly", well, there's Apple for that.
But display notches obscure the display, they're a functional issue. There's literally a hole in the image. (I have a top centre notch, and curved corners, on my A70. When watching content, wherever possible I letterbox the corners and notch out so that I'm not missing anybody the actual frame.)
Most typists aren't touching the nipple when they're typing, so is it an objection that's purely aesthetic, as opposed to notches?
My experience is absolutely not that most typists I know don't touch it accidentally, that sounds aspirational to me. It's definitely in the way and annoying if you're not thinking about it. Especially if you're doing something like video editing where you don't have your hands in the normal typing position. Or even in an IDE where you're back and forth to the trackpad a lot.
People who type a lot are super sensitive to changes in their keyboard, and this is a change to the keyboard. It's definitely both aesthetic and functional.
lol you’re downvoted but right. IBM had a lab to the west of Tokyo where lots of ThinkPads were said to have born there so not just people like them but same people make them.
FWIW - I think most of us who enjoy Thinkpads don't "see ugliness as a plus". Rather, we think it has a classic look, rather than fashionably sexy. And we do enjoy using the TrackPoint :-)
I was the same, but once I got used to it helps keep your hands almost always on the keyboard, I really love it now. Whenever I use a different laptop these days, I instinctively search for the trackpoint.