IBM’s TrackPoint understood its core purpose: to shave off a sliver of time and mental energy. That tiny red nub let typists keep their fingers on the home row, never breaking flow. Now comes the Ploopy Bean—a name that might win the award for worst product moniker ever—but its design fundamentally betrays that original vision.
The Bean is an external, wired block with a trackpoint-like nub planted dead center, surrounded by four clicky buttons. It’s meant to be a standalone mouse, but using it requires you to blindly grope for a flat plastic slab, then precisely center a finger over the nub. That’s the opposite of the seamless, eyes-free experience the TrackPoint was built for.
Back when the TrackPoint was born at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, inventor Ted Selker understood a hidden tax on productivity: every time you lift your hand off the keyboard to grab a mouse, you waste about three-quarters of a second. It doesn’t sound like much—but it adds up, especially in a cramped lecture hall or during a furious typing session. The nub eliminated that hand travel entirely.
The Ploopy Bean drops a mess all over that elegant philosophy. A traditional mouse is easy to find by touch; the Bean’s tiny footprint and flat shape make it a guessing game. Worse, you risk accidentally mashing one of the four buttons while hunting for the nub. That’s not productivity—it’s friction.
To be fair, Ploopy didn’t skimp on internals. The Bean polls at 1,000 MHz for buttery-smooth scrolling, and its schematics are open for tinkering. But raw specs can’t fix a broken concept.
Ironically, the Bean might shine in one narrow role: as a remote control for laptop presentations. Imagine a presenter clicking through slides without fumbling for a separate clicker or hunching over a podium. A wireless version of this device could, in a very niche way, actually make sense.
I’m no enemy of new input methods. I’ve championed touchscreens, dictated documents into Windows, and spent years on ThinkPad trackpoints. I’ve tried trackballs and external touchpads too. But the Ploopy Bean feels like a solution in search of a problem—one that already had a perfect answer two decades ago.
