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When I sit down to write an article about a laptop I recently reviewed, my most immediate thoughts are usually focused on a feature I liked or disliked, or what type of person it would benefit the most. But because I reviewed the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition after Lenovo announced its TrackPoint-less X9 Aura Edition at CES 2025, it became much more than a laptop. It’s tech history.
But tech history isn’t confined to a specific space and time. Its influence spans across generations, and some of the greatest tech innovations have often been a response to a collective societal need, no matter how small. That’s the TrackPoint's legacy.
Even though TrackPoint might now seem like an endangered laptop feature, history tells us it might not go extinct because of three things: brand recognition, touch typing, and ergonomics.
It’s as light as a feather and thin as a number two pencil. If not for the ThinkPad’s iconic features, I might have mistaken it for a Yoga or IdeaPad.View Deal
The late ‘80s to early ‘90s was an interesting time for laptop design. Before Apple put a trackball in its 1989 Macintosh Portable, our only option for moving the cursor around was an external mouse. Then in 1994 the company put the first-ever trackpad in its PowerBook 500, and 31 years later it’s still a mandatory laptop component. But the TrackPoint, though not as mainstream, has been around longer.
A red dot in the center of the ThinkPad’s keyboard has been an iconic part of its design since IBM released the first 700 and 700C models in 1992. It stuck around even after Lenovo purchased IBM’s personal computer business along with the ThinkPad line in 2005. But now, 20 years later, the X9 Aura Edition will be the first one without it. From a historical perspective, that’s a big deal — just as big as when IBM introduced the TrackPoint.
On its debut, InfoWorld published an interesting quote from then Dream IT president Portia Isaacson: “It would be really bad if they were going to keep pure notebooks in the line, because pad means pen.” If I was an adult in 1992, I probably would have thought the same thing. Up until that point, the ThinkPad brand had been synonymous with IBM’s pen-based tablets.
But I was five years old when the 700 and 700C were released. The only computer I knew existed at the time was the IBM desktop my parents kept in their bedroom, so I’ve always associated ThinkPad with its red TrackPoint — but I never understood why it was called a think pad until I learned the history behind its name.
As it would have been weird for some people of that generation to use a ThinkPad without a pen, it’s just as weird for some of my generation to use a ThinkPad without a TrackPoint — or even look at one without it.
The TrackPoint offers some advantages over a mouse or trackpad, a big one being you can type and move the cursor without moving your fingers away from the home row, as former Lenovo chief design officer David Hill told Tech Radar in 2017. That’s one aspect of touch typing, a specific style of keyboarding that involves positioning your fingers across the middle row of letter keys and using all 10 fingers to type without looking down at the keyboard.
American schools started offering touch typing classes in 1915, and as the Museum of Teaching and Learning (MOTAL) in Fullerton, CA notes, this style of typing was taught as an elective for business and personal reasons through the ‘70s and ‘80s. In 1992, there would have been a lot of working adults who learned this method in school — even before computers started replacing typewriters in the office. (Can you say “target audience”?)
I turn into a curmudgeon when I’m forced to change the way I do things, especially if it hinders my workflow, so I imagine a neat, little innovation like the TrackPoint that allowed them to keep a steady typing flow felt like a revelation — a solution to the collective need of typists.
The MOTAL notes that the aforementioned classes began to disappear as soon as more families started to buy PCs for their homes. My elementary school did not offer typing classes nor did it have a computer lab. I learned how to type from a video game, Sierra Online’s Kid’s Typing. There was a typing class at my high school, but it was gone by the time I graduated, replaced with another class that focused on computer literacy. (Unsurprisingly, with three computers at home and a hardware engineer for a father, I took ceramics instead.)
Typing classes made a small comeback in the 2010s once schools started realizing many young students did not have the necessary keyboarding skills to take state-mandated Common Core benchmark tests. Yet even today, in my home state of California, not every school offers typing classes, even though keyboarding skills are listed as an educational standard for English Language Arts. The schools that do offer it as an elective, meaning students are not required to take it.
But it’s highly unlikely the keyboard is going to disappear any time soon, even by the time today’s youngest generation are working adults. Keyboarding, whether they learn it at home or in school, is still an essential skill.
Looking at the merging histories of tech and education, it isn’t surprising Lenovo removed the TrackPoint from one of its ThinkPads; the prevalence of the trackpad and declining keyboarding skills could be contributing factors. But the TrackPoint still succeeded in its intended purpose: reducing wrist strain and the amount of time it takes to move your finger from the keyboard to the mouse.
For a long time I preferred using an external mouse with my laptop because it helped reduce strain on my wrist, and I could scroll and click faster compared to a trackpad. But I didn’t always have room in my bag for an external mouse (even a tiny one), so I started using a trackpad with both my hands to get around those issues. Instead of bending my right wrist to the left to navigate, scroll, and click, I kept it straight to navigate and scroll, and used my left index finger or thumb to click.
But after 15 years of working full-time in front of a computer, six of those as a full-time journalist (and nearly a lifetime of PC gaming), external mice are now the primary cause of my wrist strain — even the ergonomic ones. Sometimes the pain is so bad I have to wear a wrist brace when I’m at the computer. But the ThinkPad X1 Carbon marked the first time within the last year I could use a laptop for longer than six hours without wrist pain.
So, when I think about the kids learning touch typing in schools today, I imagine them as adults sitting in an office cubicle, popping Ibuprofen and massaging their sore wrists. Are we setting them up for a lifetime of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMSD) by not teaching them to use another mouse pointer like the TrackPoint? A recent systematic review from “WORK: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment & Rehabilitation” concluded ergonomic risk factors were “evident in both office work and telework” and that remote workers experienced increased WRMSD symptoms and pain.
The biggest lesson we can all take away from the TrackPoint is this: great innovations in tech aren’t mere competition. They are real solutions to common problems. ThinkPads with a TrackPoint seem more likely to solve those issues, and even absent formal studies with only anecdotal evidence to go on, I believe it. The TrackPoint deserves to live.
