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This weird looking thing has been a fixture on the ThinkPad for a long time and also features

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in other laptops like the Dell Latitude and the HP Elite Book.

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If you've never been sure what it is, it's a pointing stick and provides an alternative

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to the ubiquitous laptop touchpad. And yes, we know there are a number of rather unsavory nicknames for the pointing stick,

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we're just gonna refer to it as a nub because this is a family show, gosh darn it.

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Anyway, if you've ever used one and you probably know it's a little less intuitive than a touchpad since they're so tiny and it has a little bit of a learning curve to figure out

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exactly how much force to put on it. So why exactly have they stuck around for so long?

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Well, seeing as the ThinkPad has long been a firmly business-oriented product,

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it's not surprising that it was actually conceived of as a way to save time.

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The thought was that it just took way too long, a whole three-quarters of a second for a worker

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to shift from using a keyboard to a mouse and back.

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The cynic in me wants to point to this as a way for soulless corporate types to further

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micromanage their already miserable employees. But to be fair, the ThinkPad's original design didn't have any kind of pointy device built

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into it. And imagine if you were forced to use an external mouse every time you opened your laptop.

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Thus, the nub was born, first appearing on ThinkPad's in 1992 with its position smack

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in the middle of the keyboard between the G, H, and B keys.

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Make it super accessible to the index fingers of cubicle workers everywhere.

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But because this configuration meant that the nub wasn't exactly very mobile,

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IBM designed it to work by responding to small amounts of force,

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with more force speeding up the movement of the cursor. On paper, this sounds reasonable, but the very small amount of space the nub actually has to

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travel meant that there isn't much room for user error.

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Not to mention that they often suffer from drift, and you'll know how freshering that is

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if you've ever used a Nintendo Switch Joy-Con. But nonetheless, users preferred the nub to other early ThinkPad models that featured instead a

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trackball, and the nub became a mainstay. But why didn't we just skip the nub and trackball and just use the touchpad from the get-go?

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Well, the modern touchpad was actually popularized in 1994,

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only two years after the nub hit the scene by the Apple PowerBook.

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The nub simply beat it to the market by a small margin, but lest you think we're

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fully anti-nub, both Lenovo and other manufacturers have kept it around because

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there is a segment of productivity-minded users who do prefer it to a touchpad.

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We call them nubsters, just made that up. Although, as we mentioned, the nub takes some getting used to,

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its devotees discovered that it could actually be faster for workloads like text editing,

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then a mouse, or a touchpad. Important for folks who do writing, data entry, or even programming.

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Not to mention that nubs don't get in the way like touchpads can,

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which anyone who's ever accidentally touched their palm on a touchpad will know all too well

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can be infuriating. The efficiency it offers even led Lenovo to produce standalone keyboards featuring the nub,

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and a pair of mouse buttons for folks that really want a different kind of desktop experience.

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Who are you? The small size of the nub also made it a fixture on some smaller

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netbook models in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and even though netbooks aren't popular anymore,

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there's no sign of Lenovo removing the nub from the thinkpad anytime soon.

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I mean, even the lowercase i in the logo uses the nub as a dot.

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We all know how much money such a large scale rebrand would cost.

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This nub's here to stay baby. So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video hit like, hit subscribe,

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and hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover

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in the future. And I'll be later.