“Magic” mouse
Behold Apple’s new wireless mouse. The “magic” mouse. The exceedingly expensive at $69 mouse. Looks cool, sleek. Neat features – the scroll wheel/ball is replaced by a completely smooth, touch sensitive surface – you pet it to scroll up and down. It can use “gestures” like the iPod touch. When I saw one at a Mac expo, I played with it for a few seconds and decided I had to have one.
And? After the first day of using it, I hated it. It’s yet another one-button mouse. Why, Apple? Why sell a lovely yet useless product? (Also see, “Why sell me a beautiful laptop with one big honkin’ mouse button under the track pad?”) It’s impossible to play games. Even after changing the default settings so that you can “right click”, you still can’t hold down two mouse buttons at once, so you can’t run, pan up and down, etcetera.
I figured at least I could use it at work, but after a couple of days I have reluctantly concluded that it’s not even good for basic tasks like web design or word processing. “Accidental” input on the touch sensitive surface makes for random crazy scrolling up and down, sudden inexplicable selection of big chunks of text, the view zooming in and out. It’s driving me crazy. What a disappointment. Now I have this fancy Mac and plugged into it is a $10 PC mouse with 2 buttons and a scroll wheel. I get to feel like a sucker, and the devil-mouse gets to sit in its fancy little pouch, in a drawer.
