Apple, purveyor of fine product and pillar of Good Design for the universe, CANNOT DESIGN A MOUSE WORTH A SHIT.  It’s like their version of kryptonite.  Srsly, ppl—how hard is it to make an ergonomic, multi-button mouse that doesn’t suck the gonads off a donkey?  HARD, apparently, since Apple has never done it.  We’ve seen blocky incarnations that make hands sore just looking at them, non-directional one-button hockey pucks that are sexy and useless—like a quadrupel…quadrupeleig…invalid supermodel—and now, this god-forsaken Mighty Mouse bar of soap piece of carpal tunnel aggravation.

How is it that Mac users are not up in arms about this little morsel of ergonomic misery?  It defies logic.  It even defies the well-known Apple RDF—people have devoted more time and attention to deriding the appearance of the Stacks folders than they have to the abysmal history of Mac mice.  And so, Apple bumps ignorantly along while my poor tendons weep.

I want to highlight a few of the failures here:

FAIL:  It’s hard to hold onto.  The bloody thing has more curves than an Italian sports car, with nary an edge or lip to catch your fingers.  It’s nearly impossible to pick up, and when you do…IF YOU DO:

FAIL:  You inadvertently squeeze the side buttons, triggering whatever useless feature they’ve been assigned to.  Mine toggle Expose, so 40-50% of the time I lift my mouse up, whatever I was working on becomes irrelevant as all the windows on my computer glissade out onto the desktop to say, “Hello!  You don’t need us, but here we are anyway for some reason!  What are you doing?” 

FAIL:  The entire top housing is a button.  No—it’s TWO BUTTONS.  Three, if you count the middle mouse button.  This failure is actually two failures in one.  1)  The curvature of the upper housing is perfect for capturing cords or other low-profile desktop items under its radius, so that should one bump up against said item whilst trying to click the mouse, the item gets pinched and prevents said click.  This never fails to elicit total confusion for a second or two while I try to figure out why my mouse has suddenly lost the ability to click.  Clean my desk, you say?  Right.  Well in my fantasy lifestyle, the only thing on my desk is my 30” Apple Cinema Display, keyboard, mouse and a little abstract desk ornament that I can contemplate while looking out the windows of my penthouse suite over the breaking dawn of Paris.  Meanwhile, back in reality I have some number n of cables, paperclips, pens and pencils, papers, and other miscellany such that n is ALWAYS greater than the number of tasks I am engaged in, and that shit is going to get caught under there.  2) Because Apple loves the Magic of technology, they opted for making the buttons work on Magic instead of just regular, discreet hardware components.  So if you happen to click the right side of the mouse in an attempt to trigger the right mouse button, but you haven’t lifted your index finger off the left side of the mouse, the mouse thinks that what you really meant to do is click the left mouse button.  But I need my index finger there to help hold onto the slippery little bugger, so letting go with that finger is scary and potentially dangerous.  I’ve spent painfully long stretches in a desperate attempt to figure out why my right-click menu isn’t working before carefully lifting my index finger, moving my middle finger so far to the right that it’s nearly falling off, and firmly pushing down.  Right on top of a cable.  FAIL FAIL FAIL.

FAIL:  Which slides better, a hockey puck or a hula hoop?  Ok, how about four hockey pucks vs. a garbage can?  Too confusing?  How about this—everyone else thought that slippery little plastic pads would help a mouse slide around on your desktop.  Apple decided to put a huge ring of not-very-slippery plastic around the ENTIRE PERIMETER of their mouse to make it slide…better?  It’s noisier by double, and it drags like David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust years.  But it’s great because as it wears out the edge starts to flatten out, increasing the effective surface area from a thousand square feet to about 20 square miles.  You can not only hear every crumb and dust mote as you scrape over them, you can feel them too.  If only you could pick it up and wipe away these obstacles…

PASS:  That little mouse ball is a cornucopia of tactile bliss.  It feels great.  It works pretty great, what with omni-directional navigation.  And the subtle ratchety feeling is sublime.  If only it didn’t fill with finger grease, crumbs and the occasional hair, it would be heavenly.  And that wouldn’t be completely intolerable if you could take the sucker apart now and then and clean it out, but you can’t because:

FAIL:  There aren’t any screws!  It’s held together with Magic, and we all know that Magic doesn’t come with a tool kit.  See your local sorcerer for help.  Twenty years ago or so they put the ball on the bottom of the mouse and since it was pretty obvious to everyone that it needed occasional cleaning they made a little ring that you could twist to remove the ball.  But now that it’s on the top of the mouse where it’s in constant contact with your grubby little hands—nevermind being poised to catch detritus like a venus flytrap—they’ve sealed that sucker in well and good.  Fortunately, the shape is aerodynamically suited for flights across the room.

In what can only be described as a sick twist of irony, there’s one company that does it so much better that it makes me wonder if there is in fact a God, one who does things just for a good laugh now and then.  Microsoft, whose shiny new OS that took every design cue possible from Apple and still failed to duplicate it, is totally stealing Apple’s mouse mojo.  I dunno—I guess it’s fitting, in a way.  You can’t be the best at everything.