> the 21st century equivalent of a girdle. You give up a certain amount of comfort, but hey, at least you look sexy.

My wife does a lot of sewing and garment making. She has convinced me that a properly designed and fitted girdle is actually a net-benefit for people. The trouble is proper fit is hard at a mass scale, which is why women transitioned to bras, which also have notorious fit issues, but are at least manageable when mass produced.

> If you aren't old enough to have used a good laptop before laptops could be thinner than two inches, you can think of modern laptop keyboards as the 21st century equivalent of a girdle

I miss old laptop input devices, wish someone still made a laptop with a built in trackball too!

I never got to try a trackball. I remember that touchpads back in the day were garbage compared to touchpads now, though. I remember the Thinkpad nub was better than any touchpad I ever had until I got my first Macbook Pro. The Apple touchpads were so amazing I assumed they would eventually figure out keyboards, too. Still waiting ten years later.

There are plenty of trackballs available to plugin, just not anything mainstream in a laptop.

I personally would love a return to keyboards at the front edge of the laptop, with a side mounted trackball; but I doubt I'll see that.

Oh baby https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c3/Ma...

That's pretty awesome. Although I was thinking of something more like the Microsoft Ballpoint Mouse https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=22...

It's not too late! Thinkpads still come with a nub.

I tried to use the nub thing once since I have a Thinkpad through work. Really not to my taste.

It takes a while to get used to. The biggest value add for me with the nub is scrolling while holding the middle button. I love that.

I've ordered an opti-mechanical new laptop to hopefully rediscover comfort in typing. Wish me luck)