I would add to the continued laptop sales numbers but I can't find a good laptop...
I love my old IBM Thinkpad t60 but I'd like to get something a bit more powerful while retaining its usability. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a new laptop that has a similar touchpad & trackpoint (joystick/pointer thingy). All the new models -- from all manufacturers it seems -- have a "precision touchpad" (PTP), which IMO is a Bad Thing: one of the idiotic requirements for MS to certify PTP for Windows 8 (and of course all manufacturers are building for Windows 8 even if we don't want it) is that the touchpad *cannot* have separate buttons -- the whole touchpad is a button, and right-click is determined by a click while your finger is in the correct region, or a two-finger tap. I think there is a workaround to get a middle-click. I hate that. I want individual left, middle, right buttons. And although separate buttons are allowed for a trackpoint device (which can be on the same computer of course), Lenovo isn't providing them based on all the pictures on their website. I don't know how you'd press buttons while using the trackpoint if there aren't any buttons...
Plus, their keyboard quality and usability has really gone downhill. I like the keyboard on my t60 but not the one on my wife's newish Y580. It looks like all their keyboards are that way now -- and other manufacturers as well (HP and Dell, certainly).
Add to that the sad state of affairs regarding screen sizes and resolutions, again across manufacturers. My laptop's primary purpose is not watching movies; I need something with more vertical real estate. Looks like I'll have to go with more expensive quad HD just to get something more than 1080 vertical pixels, and I'm not sure I can find that in 17 inches. Why don't they make laptops with 2400x1600 displays? I've seen enough requests for something like that on various forums; seems there's a fair demand for them.
Anyone else feel the same way? Or am I just a whiner? ;-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
