Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it
Interview Launched in 1992, the boxy black ThinkPad with its little red nub remains the quintessential business productivity notebook. Unlike commercial offerings from competitors such as Dell and HP, Lenovo's laptop has a following of people who collect old models and celebrate each new innovation.
If you bought a ThinkPad between 1995 and 2017, it was probably designed under the oversight of David W. Hill, who served as lead designer under both IBM and Lenovo for those 22 years. We caught up with Hill, who today runs his own firm, ThinkNext Design, to talk about the history of ThinkPad, what drove him to make key design decisions, and the products he wanted to come out with but just couldn't.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Hill revealed that he tried several times to introduce additional laptops that had the famous "butterfly keyboard" found on the ThinkPad 701C. He spoke about wanting to create a portable all-in-one desktop that would fold up like a laptop. And he explained the evolution of the TrackPoint nub and the ThinkLight overhead light.
Hill started at IBM in 1985 and spent ten years working as an industrial designer on non-ThinkPad projects, including the company's AS/400, a mid-range computer (between a mainframe and a PC) that came out in 1988. At the time, most PCs were gray or beige.
