Apple’s never made a good mouse. Ironically for a long time the only hardware Microsoft made was a mouse and keyboard, and that mouse was amazing as a basic mouse.
Apple’s never made a good mouse.
The ADB Mouse II was a joy to use. Everything since… yeah not so much.
Apple’s never made a good mouse.
I’m fine with lots of their mice for what they were, which is one-button mice sold at a premium price. I think I’ve used every class of pointing device that they’ve produced at some point. I mean, they were okay in my book. The problem is that they kept producing one-button mice for years, which were just not the future of desktop computer use.
Back in the 1980s, when they were putting together the Mac’s UI, the Apple UI guys had an argument that what people really needed was one-button mice, which were simpler. And, yeah, I remember people, especially older people, who did not understand multiple mouse buttons. My mother used a two-button mouse on Windows for years, and I remember when I told her that the right mouse button brought up a contextual menu — somehow she’d used the computer for years without figuring out what the thing did. She always wanted to be told which mouse button to click in instructions.
The problem is that that argument was tested and frankly lost. Apple started putting context menus into the UI decades back, with a control click. People figured out multiple-button mice. And Apple kept determinedly sticking with the one-button model. They never actually produced a mouse with two physical buttons, only provided a “multi-touch” right-click once that technology showed up.
And as an OS vendor, they were in a prime position to change UI to try to teach people to use multiple buttons.
The round “hocky puck” mouse here was an exception – the ergonomics on that really were not great, and it was easy to grab the thing in a misaligned way, because you couldn’t use the shape to “feel” which way was “up” as readily.
I don’t own any but I still like their mice. I was shocked at how comfortable I found their folding mouse
Yeah the apple bar of soap was bad and continues to be bad.
Reminds me of Tesla. Trying to do something stylish and ending up with an impractical flop.
Apple still puts form over function - even the current magic mouse is more of a tabletop decoration than a functional input device. They just learned how to get away with it.
Is the charging port still on the bottom? Lol I remember seeing pictures of that shit. What a joke.
Overheard in the UX department at work: “… yeah, but I can’t right now, my mouse is charging”.
Yes. But don’t worry the next one will probably be Qi charger only so the mouse
becomes unusable for longerwon’t have filty ports spoiling it’s aesthetics.
I remember in the CD/DVD-ROM days, when you had to boot up the OS to eject the tray, because Apple didn’t want any buttons on the case.
I’ve had a disdain for that company, and Jobs, for more than 30 years, ever since I read how the latter forced the engineers mount capacitors on the flip side of the motherboard, because he felt they looked ugly when peering inside the cabinet. The result was increased complexity and overheating issues.
Apple didn’t want any buttons on the case.
They had a legitimate argument in the floppy era, I think.
The Windows PC had a mechanical eject button on floppy drives, which the OS had no control over. You could corrupt a filesystem by deciding to eject a disk at the wrong time, if the OS decided to start writing to the floppy then. To this day, that’s how 3.5" floppy drives work on Windows PCs.
Apple said — in my view, correctly — "okay, this is a disaster’. They built their computers without an eject button on the floppy drive. Their floppy drives had a motor to let the OS eject the disk, You had to ask the OS to eject a disk, and the OS would only do so when it knew that it wasn’t going to be writing to the disk. They had a pinhole through which you could push a mechanical eject button if something went wrong with the OS. That was a good call, I think. It did mean that unless you were going to use the pinhole, the drive had to be at least powered.
By the optical disc era, though, the Windows side of things had fixed things up. What you had was a system where drives had a non-mechanical eject button. The drive had two states that it could be in — the OS could ask the drive to be in a “locked” or “unlocked” state. In an “unlocked” state, the button would activate the motor to do the ejection. In a “locked” state, it wouldn’t, but the OS would receive a message from the drive, and as long as it was functioning, could unmount the thing and eject the CD.
Good write up.
I might be misremembering this, but I think the external drive I had for my Amiga 500 had hardware lockout, i.e. one couldn’t eject a disk while the drive was working. I recall it as the button being locked/couldn’t be pressed. If I’m not just remembering wrong, it would mean there were options to hinder erroneous disk ejects beyond removing the button.
can you imagine a CyberMouse? sharp edges, stops working during random updates, relies on satellite tech instead of rf for no defendable reason, recalled because they just glued the buttons on and they might get stuck, and everyone hates you when they see it?
The Amiga mouse was quite Cybertrucky in form, but pretty functional overall.
oh my god, i think you just found the item that subliminally influenced elon’s design! i’m not even kidding
Remember to put it into double-click mode before double clicking or it might catch fire
spilled your drink? that voids the warranty.
And on top it chops your fingertips off while automatically closing the charging port.
Just awful.
I had this mouse and liked it. You rest the heel of your hand on the table and don’t move your wrist at all. The mouse movement is fingers-only. Acceleration allows you to cover the entire screen with this very small amount of movement, and because it’s all fingers it’s highly accurate.
And like all ball-mice, it had a built-in fidget toy.
