Hi,
for the keyboard you could try to get a IBM/Lenovo SK-8845 or SK-8835 (with Numpad).
My main gripe with ma FW16’s is the layout – much to many Fn-key combos instead of physical keys. I miss especially PgUp, PgDn, Home and End.
But on the plus side, the keys are replacable (lift from back) and do have a scissors mechanic bultin. I’ll yet lobby FW to put key and scissors replacement in their marketplace.

There were never many useful peripherals available in ExpressCard, so adding the slot to a laptop didn’t really offer much value to the end user. The end user probably saw significantly more value from having a CardBus slot, since there was an enormous ecosystem of cards to tap into.

Of course, many of those cards were obsoleted or built into the laptop by then (wifi, probably wired ethernet too, possibly an SD slot or something), but that’s why ExpressCard never got much stuff made for it. Most ExpressCards I ever saw were just additional USB ports. I had an ExpressCard-equipped laptop and the only thing I ever put in the slot was a storage tray with a tiny pen and some folded up dollar bills.

The cards that people HAD TO HAVE would be weird industrial stuff, for instance, that never got updated to ExpressCard in the first place. And for those customers, a CardBus slot was a huge value. Plus the old stuff like extra wired ethernet ports, you wanna turn an old laptop into a router and need more interfaces? Cheap CardBus adapters made suitably-equipped machines relevant for such duties long after their ExpressCard-hobbled cousins were useless. A friend of mine ran a Thinkpad PFsense box just like that for yeeeeears. (Yes there were EC/34 ethernet cards, but they weren’t as ubiquitous or as cheap as their CB predecessors.)

I think I agree with Samsung’s logic here. CB was the more useful of the two, well into what should’ve been its technical obsolescence, simply because of the ecosystem around it.

And the point of your comment is…?

I am very excited to see someone build a trackpoint for the 16″ Framework. I assume you already know, but in case you haven’t seen it, there’s a Reddit for trackpoint builds: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrackPoint_Builders/

I just ran across this article that mentioned Framework and the old Project Ara that would be interesting to see reborn again. Framework Phone, anyone?

https://www.techradar.com/phones/project-ara-was-the-best-smartphone-idea-you-never-got-to-try-heres-why-it-deserves-a-second-chance

Can’t really compare such an old I5 to a modern CPU in performance or power efficiency, so while I agree you really don’t need all that compute especially if you run Linux for normal desktop tasks if you ever do run into compute limits that old machine will fall flat. But if you never do compiles, renders, media conversion etc you won’t notice it much if at all, at least until the ever growing bloat of the internet crushes the old hardware (something I hope we never get to). And the quality of those older Thinkpad keyboards make them hard to move on from.

Though the battery life improvements for idling along on a more modern CPU should be very meaningful if that ever comes up as well – though as Thinkpads are well designed, with good software support and optimisations where modern hardware can be very lax there so it may not actually work better – you can be fairly sure without any effort a thinkpad will go to lower power states correctly)