WEBVTT

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this weird looking thing has been a fixture on the thinkpad for a long time

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and also features on other laptops like the dell latitude and the hp elitebook

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

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alternative to the ubiquitous laptop touchpad and yes we know there are a

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number of rather unsavory nicknames for the pointing stick we're just gonna

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refer to it as a nub because this is a family showgosh darn it anyway if you've

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ever used one you probably know it's a little less intuitive than a touchpad

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since they're so tiny and has a little bit of a learning curve to figure out

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exactly how much force to put on it so

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why exactly have they stuck around for so long well seeing as the thinkpad has

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long been a firmly business oriented product it's not surprising that it was

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actually conceived of as a way to save time the thought was that it just took

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way too long a whole three quarters of a second for a worker to shift from using

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a keyboard to a mouse and back the cynic in me wants to point to this as a way

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for soulless corporate types to further micromanage their already miserable

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employees but to be fair the thinkpad's original design didn't have any kind of

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pointy device built into it and imagine if you were forced to use an external

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mouse every time you open your laptop thus the nub was born first appearing on

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thinkpads in 1992 with its position smack in the middle of the keyboard

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between the g h and b keys make it super accessible to the index fingers of

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cubicle workers everywhere but because this configuration meant that the nub

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wasn't exactly very mobile ibm designed it to work by responding to small

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amounts of force with more force speeding up the movement of the cursor

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on paper this sounds reasonable but the very small amount of space the nub

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actually has to travel meant that there isn't much room for user error not to

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mention that they often suffer from drift and you'll know how frustrating

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that is if you've ever used a nintendo switch joy-con but nonetheless users

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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 in

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trackball and just use the touchpad from the get-go we'll tell you right after we

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thank freshbooks for sponsoring today's video whether you own a business or do

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credit card required by going to freshbooks.com techwiki while the modern touchpad was

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actually popularized in 1994 only two years after the nub hit the scene by the

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apple power book the nub simply beat it to the market by a small margin but lest

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you think we're fully anti-nub both lenovo and other manufacturers have kept

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it around because there is a segment of productivity-minded users who do prefer

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it to a touchpad we call them nubsters

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just made that up although as we mentioned the nub takes some getting used to its devotees discovered that it

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could actually be faster for workloads like text editing than a mouse or a

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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 touch pads can which anyone

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who's ever accidentally touched their palm on a touch pad will know all too

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well can be infuriating the efficiency it offers even led lenovo to produce

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stand-alone keyboards featuring the nub and a pair of mouse buttons for folks

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that really want a different kind of desktop experience who are you the small

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size of the nub also made it a fixture on some smaller netbook models in the

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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 i

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mean even the lowercase i in the logo uses the nub as a dot we all know how

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much money such a large scale rebrand would cost this nub's here to stay baby

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so thanks for watching guys if you liked this video hit like hit subscribe and hit us up in the comments section with

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your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future and i'll be

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later