Please make the world a better place and reintroduce the thinklight again!
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The thinklight was the pre-keyboard-backlight solution to make the keyboard visible in low light. Why would you want/need that over the backlight that’s on all frameworks already?
I guess technically it would light up anything you put on top of your keyboard but the intended use is for you to be able to see your keyboard in the dark, which is what the backlight also does.
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its really useful for other things like finding ports, etc
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I know the ThinkLight was originally intended for illuminating the keyboard, and I agree that modern backlit keyboards are superior for that purpose.
But I have to say, using the ThinkLight in the dark had a certain “cozy” feel to it. It created just a certain vibe.
Beyond that, as a sound and light technician, I found it incredibly useful for a ton of things! One of my go-to uses was placing my show script on the keyboard and reading it under the light. It was a small feature, but it made a huge difference in practical use.
A quick search online shows I’m far from the only one who found creative uses for it. People are even DIYing their own ThinkLights into modern laptops, which just proves there’s still demand for something like this.
In my opinion, it was one of the best non-software, non-directly-computer-related features ever included in a laptop. It added real-world utility beyond just typing in the dark, and I’d love to see it make a comeback!
My own personal opinion is that the ThinkLight was superior to modern backlit keyboards for a few reasons. It was a single LED vs multiple LED today so it inherently drew less power I would imagine. It also, as others have pointed out, could do more than just illuminate the keyboard. It had a softer light to my eye and wasn’t as harsh to view that light in the dark compared to modern backlit keyboards.
I miss it but time marches onwards I suppose.
I totally agree. That’s why I hope we could have it back in an open structure like framework
its definately doable, at the cost of the webcam
it shouldnt be too difficult to the point that even I (a mecheng person who knows hardly anything about electronics design) should be able to figure it out.
Technically the power required to be able to read the keys in the dark is probably less with backlight but most laptops don’t let you set the brightness anywhere near that low so your point still mostly stands.
On the 13 setting the backlight to 1% draws not enough power to be measurable and the keys are perfectly readable in the dark.
Would love to see someone make a webcam replacement module just so I’d have something marginally more useful to put there XD.