Mighty Mouse Review

A thought struck me the other day: I’ve had pretty good luck with buying Apple products and not having them superseded in the next, like, month. I’ve had my 12" PowerBook for about two years; this was on sale until the MacBook came out (around April?), and it was probably only 15% slower/different than the best portable until the MacBook Pros came out in February. I’ve also also have an Airport Express, Shuffle, and Bluetooth keyboard for at least 18 months, all of which haven’t been upgraded. I’ve had the video iPod since that came out 9 or 10 months ago.

Anyway, I’ve been pretty happy with all of these except for the mouse, which was felt too heavy and big, didn’t right-click, and wouldn’t work smoothly on the lightly polished wood of my (Ikea) desk. (I did get a mouse mat for it eventually after putting up with the jerky action for a while, but the mat slides around the desk–not the mouse’s fault, but it still makes me resent the mouse anyway.) So, when the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse came out I ordered it straight away. It arrived the next day, which seemed pretty quick.

The Bluetooth Mighty Mouse is an improvement over my old mouse in several ways: it’s lighter, it tracks properly on my desk it feels smaller (from looking at it, it actually isn’t smaller, so this must be just because it’s lighter), and it RIGHT CLICKS! There’s a few things I don’t like about it though:

  • The squeeze function requires a surprisingly strong squeeze–I basically can’t do it without inadvertently moving the mouse.

  • The scroll ball is very small which makes it difficult to scroll smoothly through documents. The big scroll wheel on my Microsoft Mouse at work is much better. You do get used to it very quickly though. I’ll probably find it difficult to go back to a mouse without a scroll wheel/bar.

  • The maximum tracking speed is too slow! I want a faster mouse! I’m pretty sure the maximum tracking speed is “slower” than the old mouse.

  • I haven’t had any problems with the needing to lift the left finger up to right-click.

  • Not being able to see anything coming out from the bottom of the mouse is … strange! (There’s a small green LED that tells you whether the mouse is on or not.)

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied: it’s an expensive mouse, but it’s quite an improvement over the old mouse, and I think the small problems I do have with it I’ll work out/get used to over time.