Review: Apple Mighty Mouse

✎ Published: 2005-08-05 10:30:30

I reviewed the new Apple Mighty Mouse, which features one-button design and sensors for left/right clicks. However, I found challenges with right-clicking due to finger placement and limited accessibility to the squeeze buttons. Additionally, scrolling can be slow despite multi-directional functionality. Overall, I prefer alternatives offering better ergonomics and performance.

Review: Apple Mighty Mouse

I've been playing around with the new Apple Mighty Mouse since yesterday (got it at work immediately after release), and I thought I'd share a small review in case somebody who reads this blog is currently on verge of buying one of those gadgets.
The mouse looks great, and perfectly accompagnies anything from the Apple Product palette. The packaging is nothing special compared with other Apple products, there's a small disc and one needs to install a driver and reboot Mac OS X in order to use the full mouse-functionalty (Basic Functions work out of the box).
The Mouse still looks like a one-button mouse, and feels like one too. Apple build a technology that can distinguish whether you're doing a left or right click by sensors, and here's problem one I have with this mouse: I always keep my left finger on the button when I right-click, and since my finger sits on the button the mouse thinks I'm doing a left-click. So as long as you have your left finger on the button (and not lingerin atop it) you can't right-click. That's, imho, a bad solution and makes it a bit impractical for me to use the right mouse button as I currently can't change my right-click behaviour although I tried, it's rooted too deep :)
The next problem I have with this mouse are  the squeez-buttons. They're at a position where I can't reach them with my thumb, not even if I try hard: I have to change the position of my whole hand on the mouse in order to press them, and since that's not really good for any workflow I reckon I won't use these buttons much. I even tried to change the position of my palm on the mouse so I could just reach these squeeze-buttons only to discover that this position didn't allow me to use the scroll-button anymore. Which brings me to the next thing: The scroll-ball. I find the scrolling a bit slow (although I set it to full-speed in the preferences), and I find that I sometimes have to try twice until it starts to scroll. The mouse-wheel on my old logitech here works better, albeit it can only scroll on the y-axis. The ability to scroll x and y is a great enrichment to my workflow and I love it, it just could be a bit faster, scrolling in photoshop is so slow that it's faster for me to change the tool and scroll by pressing the left button.
As a conclusion I can say that I wouldn't buy this mouse myself, now that I have it here at work. I'd rather go for one of those 7Button logitech beasts which offer x/y scrolling as well (although I'm not sure if that logitech x/y scrolling is supported under mac os x).
If however, my palm would fit this mouse (which it doesn't) I'd probably be quite happy with it (and given that I could right-click with my left finger on the mouse)