This weird looking thing has been a fixture on the ThinkPad for a long time and also features
in other laptops like the Dell Latitude and the HP Elite Book.
If you've never been sure what it is, it's a pointing stick and provides an alternative
to the ubiquitous laptop touchpad. And yes, we know there are a number of rather unsavory nicknames for the pointing stick,
we're just gonna refer to it as a nub because this is a family show, gosh darn it.
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
exactly how much force to put on it. So why exactly have they stuck around for so long?
Well, seeing as the ThinkPad has long been a firmly business-oriented product,
it's not surprising that it was actually conceived of as a way to save time.
The thought was that it just took way too long, a whole three-quarters of a second for a worker
to shift from using a keyboard to a mouse and back.
The cynic in me wants to point to this as a way for soulless corporate types to further
micromanage their already miserable employees. But to be fair, the ThinkPad's original design didn't have any kind of pointy device built
into it. And imagine if you were forced to use an external mouse every time you opened your laptop.
Thus, the nub was born, first appearing on ThinkPad's in 1992 with its position smack
in the middle of the keyboard between the G, H, and B keys.
Make it super accessible to the index fingers of cubicle workers everywhere.
But because this configuration meant that the nub wasn't exactly very mobile,
IBM designed it to work by responding to small amounts of force,
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
travel meant that there isn't much room for user error.
Not to mention that they often suffer from drift, and you'll know how freshering that is
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
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?
Well, the modern touchpad was actually popularized in 1994,
only two years after the nub hit the scene by the Apple PowerBook.
The nub simply beat it to the market by a small margin, but lest you think we're
fully anti-nub, both Lenovo and other manufacturers have kept it around because
there is a segment of productivity-minded users who do prefer it to a touchpad.
We call them nubsters, just made that up. Although, as we mentioned, the nub takes some getting used to,
its devotees discovered that it could actually be faster for workloads like text editing,
then a mouse, or a touchpad. Important for folks who do writing, data entry, or even programming.
Not to mention that nubs don't get in the way like touchpads can,
which anyone who's ever accidentally touched their palm on a touchpad will know all too well
can be infuriating. The efficiency it offers even led Lenovo to produce standalone keyboards featuring the nub,
and a pair of mouse buttons for folks that really want a different kind of desktop experience.
Who are you? The small size of the nub also made it a fixture on some smaller
netbook models in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and even though netbooks aren't popular anymore,
there's no sign of Lenovo removing the nub from the thinkpad anytime soon.
I mean, even the lowercase i in the logo uses the nub as a dot.
We all know how much money such a large scale rebrand would cost.
This nub's here to stay baby. So thanks for watching guys, if you liked this video hit like, hit subscribe,
and hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover
in the future. And I'll be later.