From Abomination to Functionable: Apple’s Atrocious History of the Mouse

People think I’m an Apple apologist.  I suppose I am in the sense that I’m a big fan of their products, but it’s not based on blind faith.  I use their products, I’ve used other makers’ products and I know from experience that Apple’s products work seamlessly and actually understand the users.

That naturally begs the question, are there any Apple products  that I don’t like?

Although I’m currently underwhelmed with the just-announced iPad, for over a decade, the one Apple product I loathed with passion was their mouse.

For a company that introduced the mouse to the world, Apple’s offerings in this category has fallen somewhere between an abomination and a travesty.  Some of the issues can be traced to Steve Jobs himself, but the problem didn’t even rise to the level of asking why there aren’t two buttons because Apple’s mouse since 1998 failed even the most basic test of usability.

Apple started straying from the path with the Apple USB Mouse that came with the original iMac.  Nicknamed the “hockey puck mouse,” Time Magazine appropriately awarded it the dishonor as one of the worst inventions of the 1990s.  A perfect example of a product of form over function, the darn thing didn’t even look that nice.  In daily use, it was unusable; I don’t know of a single owner of the iMac who didn’t replace it.

There is a reason all mouse–save that one–has the identical shape of a rectangular oval: the shape is most comfortable to use.  Apple’s design team apparently never got the message or bothered to learn it on its own by using it.  The circular mouse was far too small to grip and the button (there was of course only one) was difficult to click because the small clickable area was straight on top, not top left where the index finger is.  Its infinite irritability alone justified not buying the iMac.  Thankfully I didn’t use the computer that often, but when I did, I wanted to give the mouse justice by smacking it with a hockey stick.

For reasons unbeknownst, Apple permitted this intolerable condition to persist for two years (and actually exacerbated the problem by including the damn thing in their professional line of computers) until it introduced the Pro Mouse in 2000.  That this mouse can be deemed an improvement is merely a testament to how awful its predecessor was.   The biggest attraction of the Pro Mouse was that its design returned to sanity but it was also technologically advanced because it adopted the newest optical tracking technology and did away with the rubber ball.  Apple, though, couldn’t stop at simply returning to the traditional mouse design.  It thought it clever to turn the entire mouse into a single clickable button–an unnecessary zero button “feature” that the company will continue to obsess with in all future renditions.  

The Pro Mouse, my companion during college, was not a bad mouse–unless you were right-handed using it with an Apple notebook, just like 90% of the its target customers.  My notebook, the PowerBook “Pismo,” placed USB ports on the left side.  The cord on the Pro Mouse was barely long enough to bring the  mouse to the right side, often uncomfortably close to the computer.  It was clear no genius at Apple bothered to test the mouse in daily use with a notebook they themselves sold just a year earlier.

In 2003, Apple introduced the Wireless Mouse, thankfully solving the cord issue.  The only reason this mouse was the most tolerable of the decade was because it was so simple even Apple couldn’t screw it up:  it was merely a wireless version of the single click, “zero button” Pro Mouse.

In 2006, Apple replaced the tolerable Wireless Mouse with the nonfunctioning Mighty Mouse.*  The new mouse was too clever by half.  Apple, in finally deciding to produce a multi button mouse**, spent the valuable R&D time and energy looking for ways to accomplish this simple task without having physical buttons.  In this mightily wasted effort, they produced a mouse with four clickable sections:  the left click, right-click, squeezing of the side and pushing down on the scroll ball.

The four clicks actually worked well enough; it was in fact a convenient feature because of new advances in the operating system such as Exposé and Dashboard.  What made the mouse wholly useless was the 360° scroll ball.  Apple “improved” on the standard scroll wheel by introducing a scroll ball that, in theory, would permit you to scroll down, up, right, left and diagonally.  In reality, it did the latter four that mattered least and didn’t do the first that mattered most.  In daily usage, the scroll ball quickly clogged–in my repeated efforts to replace it, the average lifespan was a matter of months–and the mouse would simply stop scrolling down.  That the wireless version, with batteries, weighed more than the computer hardly made it a pleasure to use.

By 2009, when Apple introduced the Magic Mouse (the names were always underservingly haughty), I can be forgiven for thinking Apple was wholly inept at producing a functioning mouse.  The newest attempt, which Apple mercifully introduced via a press release rather than showing off at a trade show, finally got scrolling right by incorporating the touch screen technology that Apple popularized in the iPhone and the iPod Touch.  Remaining stubbornly consistent, the mouse lacks a physical button.  By adopting the touch pad, Apple reduced the mouse to two clickable areas.

The Magic Mouse is far from perfect.  Aside from its limited utility–it effectively only supports double clicking and scrolling–the size remains too small for comfort.  But having used it for a month, the mouse handles those two basic but most important duties effectively, smoothly and without hassle–something that disturbingly could not be said about Apple’s past efforts.

Magic Mouse is not magical.  It’s not even mighty.  But at least the darn thing works.

*  In reality, Apple had introduced a USB Mighty Mouse a year earlier, providing users with the option of choosing the Wireless Mouse or the Mighty Mouse.

**  This was a decision long overdue because the Mac operating system long supported a multi button mouse, such as Microsoft’s, even though Apple didn’t produce one of its own.