The beefier business line models are still decent though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick#Naming_and_bran...
> Something that we hear over and over again across our entire product lineup is that people want pointing sticks. You might know it as trackpoint from other brands. The little nubs that you can use as a mouse. Obviously, if you're a ThinkPad user, former ThinkPad user, that might be something that you're very familiar and comfortable with. And so, it is something that actually on all of our products several times over the last 5 years, we have tried to prototype and make work. The big challenge on this actually is just that there's very, very little space here. That the Zstack here is incredibly thin.
> And for a keyboard, it works because the keys are compliant. If there's force that's put on the lid, like let's say you're got your laptop in a backpack with a book or something, it's just being pressed on like that, the screen is going to touch the keys and the keys are going to give way because they're just on these uh on these scissor mechanisms and the screen will be okay and you may get a little smudge you have to wipe off. You've got like finger grease on there.
> A pointing stick though is not compliant. Not compliant in that way. So, you've got this like sharp point basically sticking out from the keyboard. And if there's pressure placed on the lid, that's going to go right onto that point on the tracking stick and end up damaging screen or have a high likelihood of damaging the screen.
> And so, we've just kept over and over, we've kept trying this and seeing if we could get a low enough profile pointing stick solution to make that work, not risk the screen at all. And so far, that doesn't exist. That is something that we keep going into the supply base to try to find.
> Hopefully we that is something we find in the future because of course with this input module system on framework laptop 16, it would end up being relatively straightforward for us to just make an input module a keyboard that you can swap in that's got that pointing stick unlike uh you know even our other laptops where you'd have to have an entirely new input cover to get that kind of functionality.
I am thinking that something with a nub on a 2-axis slider as opposed to rocker switches could be an option, but that would potentially have drift issues. Not to mention the Framework keyboards themselves are probably mostly a COTS solution, where something like I'm thinking would require custom R&D an likely be limited release. If Framework, Dell and Lenovo could work together, they could probably come up with a good solution... though Lenovo likes the Fn button in the corner, where most others prefer Ctrl then Fn.
We just have to let go. A haptic trackpad is miles better now.