I support the company that makes the closest thing to a product I want. Reimaging the computer is a lot easier than installing your own pointing stick.
I don't think people understand the magnitude of this betrayal. When you buy a tool, it should obey you, and any deviations from that expectation should be disclosed upfront.
Imagine if you bought a car that detected when you were driving to a particular business, locked out steering, and instead drove you to a competitor that had "partnered" with the manufacturer. You totally own the car, and no one ever told you it had this "feature."
Imagine if you bought a gun that would refuse to fire when pointed at people who had purchased protection from the manufacturer. You don't find out about this feature until the guy invading your home has it.
Lenovo lied to your face. It sold laptops that claimed to navigate to the websites you entered in the URL bar, but instead displayed a version edited by Lenovo on behalf of its partners.
Normalizing this sort of thing is not okay and anyone buying Lenovo post-Superfish shares the moral responsibility when this is our future.
Considering we apparently don't "own" our Kindle ebook purchases, I can see a future where our hardware purchases are on indefinite loans to us rather than outright purchases.
No, I don't think YOU understand how unusable some people find a touchpad compared to a pointing stick. Your examples are still better than a car that does not run or a gun that explodes in my hand as soon as I touch it.
You even tried to fabricate examples where the surprise factor of the product not working as expected at a key moment was the bulk of the problem. As if that's somehow not the biggest flaw of a touchpad.
Wait, really? So the things mentioned in the comment thread on this¹ post mean less to you than getting a trackpoint?
In any case, Lenovo isn’t the only manufacturer that includes a pointing stick in their laptops. HP’s EliteBook series, for example, has one. There’s a full list of manufacturers here².
Yes, far worse. A laptop without a nub-style pointer is effectively keyboard-only. Worse than keyboard-only if there is no way to disable the touchpad.
I know that elitebooks, latitudes, etc used to have these too. None of them do anymore.
Have you tried a Macbook Pro in the last few years? I agree most (if not all) Windows laptops' trackpads are unusable, but I've always liked Apple's.
Many Windows OEMs maintain their cheaper-than-Apple status by optimizing the things people compare (gigahertz, RAM capacity, HDD capacity) and putting in the cheapest shit possible on the rest (pixel density, keyboards, cases, hinges, and especially trackpads).
Macbooks don't have them, never have, and probably never will. The quality of the touchpad is not the issue. You are trying to sell a blind man a book by saying "no seriously, this one has REALLY BIG print" because you don't believe he's truly blind.
