Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Are These Red Things Still On Laptops?”.
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 gon na 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 thank freshbooks for sponsoring today’s video, whether you own a business or do freelance work. Freshbooks is designed to make accounting and invoicing easier for you with the ability to integrate over 100 different apps, there’s always a simple way for you to connect with your team and your clients. It’S easy to start and their award-winning support.
Staff is always there to help. Take out some of that unnecessary stress in your life and start your first 30 days free with no 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 your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future and i’ll be later .