As everyone knows, one of the ThinkPad’s biggest draws is the TrackPoint, and newer ThinkPads have been caring less and less about it — not only has the height been cut way down, but it keeps getting shorter and harder to use, again and again. Maybe the TrackPoint just doesn’t fit with the mainstream Windows laptop push toward touchpads these days, but it’s still the last stubborn holdout for ThinkPad fans. The obvious fix is to swap the stock cap for a third-party one. I swapped mine out before — a 3D-printed piece by Mr. Saoto in Japan. My impression back then was that it felt great: it fit the finger nicely and was easy to use. The only downsides were that the color was a bit ugly and the material seemed pretty ordinary — not very durable. A while back I saw on Etsy that Mr. Saoto had released a new version of the 3D-printed TrackPoint, made with a composite material and with better colors, so I decided to grab one. Getting it, though, was a real ordeal.

Starting with the ThinkPad X240, the TrackPoint got thinner, and the feel got worse too. It lost that “point where you want, go where you point” convenience of the original ThinkPad X230. Honestly there’s not much to be done about it — laptops have to get thin, and this is hard to balance. By the time the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th came along, the TrackPoint’s size got even more awkward. Still, the TrackPoint’s advantages are irreplaceable, so I just put up with it. Naturally, a Japanese guy named さおと (saoto) wasn’t having it, and decided to solve the problem with 3D printing. I found out about saoto from a Taiwanese friend’s blog. He made his own little TrackPoint cap to replace the stock one, and it’s said to greatly improve the feel, so I decided to give it a try. saoto has released the 3D-print files for his cap design, but you can also buy one from him, and the price isn’t especially steep. What arrives is a plain envelope from Japan. When you open the envelope, be careful not to just tear it apart — there’s an instruction sheet inside… The sheet explains the design concept behind the cap in detail, plus the various versions included, covering both the old-style and new-style TrackPoints.

As a semi-loyal ThinkPad fan, my love for the TrackPoint is no less than my love for Ms. Atsumi Tanezaki. So whether on the X230 or the X250, the TrackPoint has become my go-to pointing device. Sometimes even with a Bluetooth mouse connected, I’ll find myself using it for a while and then tossing the mouse aside to go back to the TrackPoint. So here’s the thing: my X230 has been in use for almost two years now, and its TrackPoint is battered—gray and no longer bright, and it seems a bit shiny too. So I figured I’d find a new one to swap in. I knew Taobao had them… but I didn’t know there were actually three kinds of TrackPoint:

I use my own laptop for work. It’s not that the desktop machines at the office are bad, they’re just a hassle to use. Over a year ago I bought a ThinkPad X230, and using it since then I’ve really come to appreciate how good ThinkPads are. If something goes wrong you can just find the parts yourself and fix it. Honestly, even if you smashed it, I could buy some bits on eBay and put it back together for you… Over the past year or so I’ve replaced the screen, messed with the cooling, and the machine runs fine. But there were still a couple of things that bugged me. One, the screen was the cursed 1366 x 768. Two, the battery life was bad. Even with a 9-cell I could only push power draw down to 11W at best, and it would randomly spike to 20W… So when I heard the ThinkPad X250 was announced and that it brought back the original trackpad, I just bought it. Why not a Mac? Because I don’t use OSX, and I think putting Ubuntu on an RMBP is too much hassle.