Well I’ve had the mighty mouse for about a month now and I have to say that it’s got problems. First I’d like to mention the good stuff:

  • Slick Overall Design - typical Apple.
  • Innovative use of pressure buttons.
  • In theory the squirrel ball is a good idea.
  • Touch sensitive button diferentiation is clever.

Overall a neat concept, but as I am about to elaborate, not a good implementation.

Now the problems:

  • Short Cord. I’m talking like a foot and a half here. What were you thinking Apple? Was this supposed to plug into the right hand of some keyboard? How about an extension cable?
  • Very very small squirrel ball. Needs to be about 1.5x to 2x as big. This problem is compounded by Apple’s weak acceleration models. Scrolling through a long page or document is utterly distasteful. I ended up downloading USB Overdrive and tweaking the accelerations so that it behaved more “normally” (read: more like Windows).
  • Button differentiation is weak, and sometimes does not work. I have to mentally remind myself to lift my other fingers when I right/middle click. This is further compounded by clicks on the squirrel ball taking an inordinate amount of time to complete (invokes Dashboard). And it’s even further compounded by having a slower machine (Mini 1.25Ghz).
  • Design is not ergonomic. Apple, look at Logitech’s mice. Learn. A mouse, much like my hand, is not and should not be symmetric. I constantly feel like I’m holding it wrong. I’m never just comfortable with it. I have to move my grip around so that I can activate the pressure buttons and I have grip it with another hand-stance to get the “slow” right clicks off. These occur when the machine is busy access disk. Everything is more lethargic when this occurs, including getting the context menu. In these conditions, I’m not sure if it’s the machine or the mouse which dropped the “right” part of the context.
  • The optical sensor is a bit behind the times. When I use it without a bad on a wood desk with a light color and grain pattern, it gets easily lost and when it does, it zips to the bottom left hand corner (which irritatingly activates my screensaver). There’s much higher resolution technologies that can help alleviate that problem. Again, refer to Logitech.

In the end, it would have been better for me not to get one. This is obviously a first version prototype, that somehow got past their faulty product sensors and got to market. Though based on their previous designs, I think Apple has a staff of lilliputians with crab hands doing their mouse design.


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