pretty but dumb
I don’t like Apple’s Mighty Mouse. Style has trumped function in a really bad way here.
The Mighty Mouse is a 4-button optical mouse with a two-way scroll ball. Apple has never, until now (where “now” is like, 6 months or a year ago — I’m naturally way behind in “reviewing it” here), itself released a mouse with more than one button, though OS X has always supported multiple button input devices in software. I’ve never really cared too much, personally, because you can always buy third-party mice that are adequate. But the fact that Apple has stubbornly refused to let go of its one-mouse, one-button policy in a world where even your grandmother probably uses a two-button mouse on her $300 Dell PC for email has been seen as … dumb. Also getting a mouse that you’re never going to want to use bundled with your $2000 computer is kind of obnoxious. (As an aside, for those who don’t know, you can get a right-click on any single-button mouse by holding down control and left-clicking.)
So the Mighty Mouse should be good news. I’ve had one for a few months now, and this morning I’m particularly annoyed with it, so I’m going to do what every blogger procrastinating on homework should: complain about it pointlessly on my blog.
So first, it has two buttons, but this functionality is hidden and must be enabled in software. Everyone who’s a Windows user by default complains about Mac mice having only one button. It supports the perception that Macs are toys. The computer lab manager at school is ostensibly a Mac guy, got four new Intel iMacs (to replace four 4-year old(!) all-but-useless G4s in a lab full of more recent Dells), but didn’t know about the two-button Mighty Mouse functionality and so the replicated default install on each of the Macs leaves the second button disabled. Individual users could enable it in their preferences if they wanted to, but who — among a bunch of non-geek students — is going to know about or bother with something like that? And due to the design of the mouse itself — which is “cleverly” styled to look and feel like a one-button mouse — no one who doesn’t know ahead of time would ever suspect the mouse of having two buttons (much less four).
But maybe this is for the best, because that “clever” styling makes actually using the right button quite frustrating. It sounds easy on paper: click on the left-ish side of the mouse, you get a left click; click on the right-ish side of the mouse, you get a right-click. Click in the middle (a “chord”), you get a third button. In practice, the fact that there’s no hard dividing line between the buttons makes for a lot of mistaken clicks. When I’m working fast, I don’t want to have to think about where, precisely, to place my finger, or to bother with going to the edge of the left or right side of the mouse to be sure I don’t miss. It seems that Apple has forgotten Fitt’s Law. If there were some tactile feedback I could use — say, a rougher surface under the ideal clicking region — that would at least be something. The only such feedback available is the scroll ball, but for my finger to orient itself based on that, it has to move to the center of the mouse and then must travel back to where I think “left-ish” or “right-ish” unambiguously begins. That takes too long.
Though I have to say I’m impressed that it usually does get the middle-button chord right. I often get a right-click contextual menu when I really wanted a left click, but rarely do I hit the chord (which I have set to trigger Exposé’s Show All Windows) unintentionally.
And yes, then there’s the scroll ball. Another terribly “clever” bit of Apple engineering. It gives you both vertical scrolling, as is standard on most non-Apple mice, and horizontal scrolling (which, incidentally, you can also achieve using any vertical-scrolling mouse by holding down shift). Pretty spiffy in theory. In practice, it’s also kinda spiffy, if physically very tiny (and weirdly nipple-like). My main complaint is that it’s a piece of moving hardware that comes into contact with your skin — your oily, dirty skin. I thought the point of optical mice was to avoid the problem of dirty moving parts. Here we have one again, and, horrifyingly, stupidly, there’s no way to get into the mouse to clean it.
Apple has this sort of minimalist Modern chic thing going, which I like, but this is the classic issue of Modernism: clean, pretty and jewel-like, but really dumb at interfacing with us messy, organic humans, and/or the rest of the environment. (Though I’m glad to hear about their expanded recycling program.) The mouse fits better behind glass, under museum lights, than in the palm of someone actually trying to get work done.
So anyway, this morning, my scroll ball stopped working in the down direction. After futzing with it and scowling darkly for about 5 minutes, whatever piece of gunk had lodged itself between the ball and the wheel that reads movement in that direction dislodged itself and now I have my scroll ball back. This shouldn’t happen in a $50 mouse. Nor should mistaken clicks.
April 24th, 2006 at 10:02 am
I loved the horizontal scolling of the Mighty Mouse, but hated just about everything else - including the fact that my hand cramped because it was so short.