Feed: Slashdot
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Title: ThinkPad Designer David Hill Spills Secrets, Designs That Never Made
It

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/07/2125...

alternative_right shares an interview from The Register with David W. Hill,
who served as lead designer for ThinkPad from 1995 to 2017. Here are some
excerpts from the wide-ranging interview: Hill revealed that he tried several
times to introduce additional laptops that had the famous "butterfly
keyboard" found on the ThinkPad 701C. [...] Hill told The Register that he
had wanted to make more ThinkPads with butterfly keyboards and had tried at
least three times to make it happen -- in one case there was a prototype
where only half of the keyboard moved -- but was never able to get there.
Eventually, screens became big enough that there was no need to have a
keyboard that expanded. However, Hill said, he thought about putting a
butterfly keyboard on a netbook when they were a viable product category in
the late aughts. [...] One of the features Hill is most proud of developing
is the ThinkLight, an overhead light located above the screen that lit up the
entire keyboard and deck. Though the advent of keyboard backlights has made
the ThinkLight redundant -- Lenovo discontinued it in 2013 -- it offers
capabilities that backlights do not. If you want to place a paper on top of
your keyboard, the LED will light it up, allowing you to see more than just
your key legends. ... When designing the 25th anniversary ThinkPad, which
came out in 2017, Hill brought back the ThinkLight, but he actually wanted to
have -- for the first time -- two LEDs instead of one. The dual lights would
have eliminated shadows and provided even better illumination, but
unfortunately, this effort proved too costly to make it into the final
product. [...] When I asked Hill about products he wanted to come out with
but never got to, he talked about an idea for portable workstations that
would fold up like a laptop but have a separate keyboard and screen like a
desktop when you put them on your desk. He collaborated with butterfly
keyboard creator John Karidis on this concept, but couldn't make it ready for
market. "We did a lot of experimentation with laptops that sort of unfolded
to be more like a desktop: things where the display elevated or the keyboard
would remove so you could use them like a workstation, rather than just being
a clamshell with a hinge, you open and close," Hill recalled. "We did a lot
of experimentation with that and got close a few times, but never could
completely sell it. I always thought it was an opportunity to create a new
category."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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