this weird looking thing has been a fixture on the thinkpad for a long time
and also features on other laptops like the dell latitude and the hp elitebook
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 showgosh darn it anyway if you've
ever used one you probably know it's a little less intuitive than a touchpad
since they're so tiny and 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 open your laptop thus the nub was born first appearing on
thinkpads 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 frustrating
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 in
trackball and just use the touchpad from the get-go we'll tell you right after we
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credit card required by going to freshbooks.com techwiki while the modern touchpad was
actually popularized in 1994 only two years after the nub hit the scene by the
apple power book 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 than 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 touch pads can which anyone
who's ever accidentally touched their palm on a touch pad will know all too
well can be infuriating the efficiency it offers even led lenovo to produce
stand-alone 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
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later