For me, having discrete buttons is the primary reason I've been buying Precisions, and before that Latitudes.
I've been using touchpad for 2 decades now because having to move my whole arm half a kilometre away from the keyboard every time I want to shift the pointer is just nah. If I wanted to use mice I'd just get a desktop already. But I have never been able to adjust to buttonless (been deliberately trying on a couple of machines from work and it just ain't happening).
The lack of that option is a ghastly horrible nightmare.
Also, what in Zandru's Nine Hells was Dell thinking with that keyboard on the newer machines? Especially those arrow keys and the home/end. Madness!
Do they now see Precisions as some kind of Macbookesque hipster bauble people only use to lounge at Starbucks watching Netflix? Isn't this supposed to be a work machine for working people to do work on?
I've seen more practical keyboards on a calculator watch from the 1980s. Were I designing it the arrow keys would look like something on a baby toy. I'd make it so you could spot those things from orbit.
So here's a question: are those cable connections for the touchpad a standard thing?
Like, ignoring for a moment the other inconvenient physical practicalities, if a touchpad from, say, a 7540 was attached instead, could the machine recognise it?
