The answer, of course, is “yes.”
Why not eliminate this wasted movement by adding cursor input to the keyboard?
Turning this observation into a usable rig took years.
Matthew S. Smith / Lifewire
TrackPoints popularity was never guaranteed.
Critics favored the TrackPoint, however, and it became standard on all ThinkPad laptops in 1995.
Is TrackPoint Actually Better?
Matthew S. Smith / Lifewire
I first encountered TrackPoint on a ThinkPad T40 I purchased for college in 2003.
This, of course, was TrackPoints intended purpose.
Selker and Rutledges experiments focused on using the cursor while typing.
“And then three minutes later, you could actually do text editing as fast as a mouse.
45 minutes later, you could actually do it faster than a mouse.
So that was a really big deal.”
IBM reiterated this advantagein a 1990 video detailing the advantage of IBMs “in-keyboard analog pointing unit.”
TrackPoint wasnt built for fast point-and-click tasks.
It was invented to eliminate the strain of switching between keyboard and mouse.
TrackPoint makes sense for writers, editors, or coders who spend hours working with text.
Will Lenovo Ever Remove the Nub?
The 2014 ThinkPad X1 Carbon had fans crying foul.
Lenovo also introduced a new model, the ThinkPad 11e, without the TrackPoint.
The X1 Carbons second generation brought back the physically separate left and right buttons for good.
The ThinkPad 11e is now discontinued.
Lenovo learned to embrace the touchpad, touchscreen, and TrackPoint without allowing one to detract from the others.
