
Apple Pro Mouse - Doubleguitars
http://www.minimallyminimal.com/blog/apple-pro-mouse
======
droithomme
An Apple mouse has come with every Mac I've bought. The first thing I do with
them is throw them away. Worst mouse ever. Don't care that it is oh so pretty
so very precious pretty. While I'm ranting, mice with heavy batteries
aggravate carpal tunnel. Lightweight wired mice with a wheel and many buttons
for the win. $9 buys a great mouse, a superior mouse that is more ergonomic.
Things that harm your wrists are not ergonomic. Ergonomics and usability are
not about curves and translucent plastic. And simplicity and elegance is not
about having to use a second hand to press a control button on a separate
device in order to access the functions of the right mouse button such as
contextual menus.

~~~
micampe
Yes. And the Magic Trackpad beats any mouse for any task that is not Photoshop
or gaming.

~~~
atmosx
True, the trackpad is a killer once you get the handle of it.

~~~
swah
I didn't like mine (and it was a PITA to get it), probably because there is no
"resting position" like with a big mouse.

~~~
raverbashing
Well, I never thought of this

I just keep the base of the hand outside the lower part of the trackpad

There's also a trackpad<>keyboard hand movement as well so it doesn't stay
there always.

------
Jonovono
I don't get it. Everyone seems to be commenting saying the mouse is actually
crap or not ergonomic. He says that the mouse is not the best, but it led to
the creation of better things like the magic mouse. In fact, the article is
about so much more than just a mouse.

The ending quote :

"But in terms of visual richness, the Apple Pro Mouse is still in a league of
its own. This mouse remains as one of the most magical products I’ve ever
seen. And the magic doesn’t just come from its mystifying appearance; it’s
magical because it exists. For most products, clarity becomes fogged up with
doubt and lack of ambition. They have no opinion, are overly apologetic as
they are designed to satisfy too many people. Steve Jobs didn’t believe in
this approach. He made the zero button mouse a reality, and in tandem created
the most simple, elegant operating system possible. The Apple Pro Mouse wants
to exist in the future, where everything is intuitive. It’s so much of an
bullish product that it wasn’t till the Magic Mouse that we truly understood
what its intentions were. It’s a huge statement but makes no excuses for
believing in what’s right. And this truly epitomizes what made Apple so
special under Jobs. "

So it's more a commentary on what made / makes Apple great.

I liked this quote as well:

"Regardless of what you may think of the Apple Pro Mouse, I believe that
there’s something admirable about its stubbornness. It’s like a masterful chef
that’s owned a restaurant for decades and refuses to change their ways
(Sukiyabashi Jiro comes to mind). If everyone was that stubborn, society
wouldn’t function, but it’s these people with strong beliefs that help the
rest of society ground their opinions. When so much of the world produces
apologetic, impartial products, we need some stuff that pushes our notions
forward. The mice that Apple made were just that."

So I guess, instead of just talking about the mouse we could talk about what
the article is actually about: making amazing products that have opinions and
don't try to please everyone, having this vision for how things should be and
just building that with whats possible! Make things that polarize people. I
think there are lots of interesting statements in there, and none of them are
about mice hah.

~~~
chiph
Looking good and working good are not mutually exclusive.

I like the magic mouse, but for day-to-day mousing, I use an original
Microsoft Intellimouse Optical.

Another mouse that looks good but doesn't work good is the Microsoft Arc Mouse
(the bendy one). Love the design. But after 15-20 minutes I'm getting cramps
from it.

------
lisper
The pro mouse may have looked pretty but it was absolutely horrible in terms
of functionality. When you're dragging, if you get to the edge of your mouse
pad it's really important to be able to pick up the mouse and reposition it
without releasing the button. This maneuver is virtually impossible when the
entire top case of the mouse is a button.

~~~
duskwuff
That's what the little grips on the side are for - you can hold the mouse in
the clicked position if you've got your thumb on one of those.

~~~
shittyanalogy
And thus we are right back in the land of unnecessary complexity

~~~
eurleif
I used an Apple Pro Mouse for a while. Using the grips when picking it up just
came naturally, as I recall.

------
saint-loup
The article doesn't mention the fact that most Apple mouse have terrible
ergonomics, but it contains a great anecdote on serendipitous design:

>> According to an interview by Cult of Mac with a former Apple ME, Abraham
Farag, the Pro Mouse’s design was born unintentionally. During a design
review, Steve Jobs was shown six different models of mice to evaluate. But
Jobs was instead drawn to a seventh design, an unfinished model with the
buttons yet to be built in. Jobs thought the buttonless design was brilliant,
and the design team played along, pretending that it was their intention from
the beginning. This unfinished design became the foundation of future Apple
Mice.

------
SkyMarshal
_> Apple is a company that doesn’t have a great track record for mice though.
Users have always complained about the lack of a right click button and scroll
wheel. This was however one of the key drivers for the simplification of Mac
OS. Steve Jobs insisted that if the OS should be simple enough to be operated
with just one button. _

This sounds great in theory but I don't think it works as well in practice.
The great thing about a right-click mouse button is contextual menus, aka
locality. For anything on your screen, if you want to know everything it can
do, just right click on it.

There's no need to refer to a distant top menu bar, which only works when the
app/window you're interested in is first focused, which is not something
unsavy users easily pick up on. Just right click - it does both for you,
focuses the window and provides all relevant functionality. Much simpler and
easier for unsavy users to learn and remember.

The fact that Apple had to add a pseudo-right-click functionality in the form
of holding Option or Command or whatever while clicking should have been a
hint that maybe lack of easy access to a universal context menu is a bug not a
feature.

------
muaddirac
My eyes just really don't see any of the mice in these photos as "beautiful,"
least of all the Apple Pro Mouse.

These sorts of things are so subjective. Where the author sees an homage to
the marbles he played with as a kid, the glare reminds me of a J.J. Abrams
lens flare, distracting from the environment rather than blending in.

------
rlu
I went to a school that was Mac heavy and I remember most of my school peeps
really disliking the mouse since it made it harder to do things that they
already knew how to do on Windows.

Design is great and all, but when you nerf what is/was literally the interface
by which you operate a computer, it causes great frustration.

His section about stubbornness didn't resonate with me either. Sounds to me
like he's just giving Apple a pass because he likes Apple. That's fine, but we
should just be honest about it.

------
webwielder
The Apple Desktop Mouse II is an under appreciated looker:
[http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-
ZD603_1003mi_M_...](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-
ZD603_1003mi_M_20131003114323.jpg)

Great Apple mouse gallery here;
[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230372260...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303722604579113283259156414#1)

------
KaiserPro
Its amazing how pretty you can make something if you don't need to make it
comfortable/functional, High heels, Bras, Sports cars, Watches and chairs.

~~~
colmvp
When there's already plenty of objects that apply to the common user, there
really isn't much excitement over doing simple iterations versus creating
something for a much smaller audience.

------
noblethrasher
Wow, I was just about to mention how much I missed his podcast, The Wish List,
only to discover that it looks like it might be back: They published a show on
April 30 after a 16 month hiatus.

If you like discussions on design and related topics, you should check it out.

------
geon
> Utilizing Apple’s knowledge in capacitive touch sensors used in the iPod,
> they made a zero button mouse that can sense left and right clicks.

Huh. I always thought the top part had enough flex to allow clicks on either
side, but the ifixit teardown shows only one switch (the component marked
d2fc-7-h).

[http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/AGSiPJBxVc1RXnMh.hu...](http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/AGSiPJBxVc1RXnMh.huge)

------
natmaster
This is a great example of the reality distortion field. Apple produces
probably the worst product ever designed - in every way imaginable and there's
still people claiming it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

------
shurcooL
I'm a huge enthusiast of mouse and other input devices, UIs, and I've tried
the Magic Mouse, as well as gaming grade mouse devices like the Logitech G9.

Here's the thing. The Magic Mouse excels at some key areas, but it's vastly
inferior in some others. Overall, it ends up being worse for certain types of
uses (long term, high performance).

Here's the breakdown of the Magic Mouse for various mousing tasks:

Vertical Scrolling - the Magic Mouse is hands down way better than G9 or any
other mouse.

Horizontal Scrolling - Magic Mouse wins here even harder than at vertical
scrolling. This is definitely one of its highlights.

Pointer tracking - it's not as good as a gaming grade laser mouse, but it's
good enough. This isn't the part that makes people hate it.

Gestures - pretty good, but not as amazing as the Magic Trackpad. Better than
normal mouse that have none, but "decent gesture support" is not necessary
better than "no gesture support", because it should be great to be usable.

Left clicking - okay.

Right clicking - not so great. You have to physically lift your left finger so
it doesn't touch the mouse surface in order to right click. This is okay to do
once every 5-10 minutes, but more often than your hand will get tired really
fast.

Now, here's the part that absolutely kills the mouse and the main reason why
so many people dislike it, IMO.

Switching between various modes - performs really poorly compared to, e.g.,
Logitech G9 or pretty much any other standard mouse. Here's a worst case
benchmark that showcases the weakness here: imagine you need to, in rapid
succession, do a left click, right click, scroll a fixed amount, repeat. Try
doing that as fast as you can on for 90 seconds on a Magic Mouse. Your hand
will be extremely tired, because each of the 3 modes of operation are best
performed using different hand positions. On the other hand, with a mouse like
G9, your hand position is almost identical for all 3 tasks. So alternating
between them is effortless in comparison.

So the bottom-line is: the magic mouse excels at some key areas (which makes
some people love it), but fails really hard at some other (less noticeable to
the average user) key areas and becomes really tiring to use at high
performance for longer periods of time (which makes people hate it).

It's an example of Apple failing to build a "great _all around_" experience
that they usually succeed at (see MacBook Pro Retina, iPhone hardware, etc.).

------
judk
The buried lede here is the confirmation that the Pro mouse was a mistake:
Jobs' "form over function" aesthetic gone to absurd extreme.

------
badman_ting
Much as I like many other things Apple makes, I haven't liked any of their
mice and this version is no exception. However, I would perhaps say this one
is the least-bad. I liked how clicking was simply pressing down on the whole
mouse.

Even though I hate their mice I think their trackpads are great. I have no
mice at all anymore.

------
Theodores
For the last quarter century or so Apple have known that their peculiar take
on the mouse idea does not suit everyone. If you come from a PC or UNIX
background then there are conventions regarding how the mouse works - context
menu is right click, not some weird keyboard + mouse convention.

People like me have avoided the Apple product for many reasons with the mouse
problem high up the list. What I don't understand is why they have offered
weirder and weirder mice over the years, all with reliability problems and
ergonomic woes, with no option to just get a regular mouse. They could have
hooked up with Logitech and made an Apple mouse for PC users, with the buttons
in the right place and a novelty fruit logo to make it look desktop-worthy.
They could have charged £25 for it and, people that have avoided the Apple
cult due to the weird mouse could have been brought on-board.

I know I am not alone in disliking the Apple interface, I am actually the one
person that likes Ubuntu Unity, however there are lots of PC users out there
that just do a job and haven't the patience/need to learn the Apple mouse
oddities. At a presentation or tutorial if the machine is an Apple then the
non-Apple people get stuck on basic things like using a web browser or saving
a file.

I am a big fan of Steve Krug's 'Don't Make Me Think!' book:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Make-Me-Think-
Usability/dp/0321...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Make-Me-Think-
Usability/dp/0321344758)

The problem with the Apple interface choices is that it does make me think,
but not in the right way. I just want to do the task in hand and not wonder
why it is that you have to hold down some cryptic key on the keyboard to do a
right click.

I also noted in this article how many of the failures of the various Apple
mice could be ignored so easily by someone in the Apple cult. Underlying this
is a problem with understanding what truly great design actually is.

That really boring Logitech or Microsoft mouse is actually great design. The
ergonomics are a treat as is the reliability. They have been bold enough to
make something that actually works rather than something that looks pretty.

~~~
alayne
store.apple.com sells Logitech mice and keyboards. You can just right click
with a mouse in OS X, even on an Apple Magic Mouse, though it does need to be
enabled in preferences.

------
kronin
The logitech trackman marble wheel is my device of choice. I like the
thumbball better than a finger-operated trackball. Sadly the wired version
isn't made anymore. thankfully I have 2 and they are bulletproof.

------
nikdaheratik
Their latest mouse is pretty good for most work related stuff. I don't really
like the way it handles the left mouse button, however the touch scroll wheel
is very nice, and once you get the hang of the other gestures you can use,
it's a bit like a trackpad that you can actually use to drag things.

I break out the Logitech with two side buttons whenever I want to actually do
any gaming though. Terrible mouse for gaming with.

------
antidaily
Been using a trackpad for a year. Will never go back.

------
galago
This article moves towards, but doesn't really get to the fact that mice are,
for may intents and purposes, over. Mobile gestures are now expected on the
desktop...so trackpads are the state of the art.

------
pmoriarty
How about a trackball?

~~~
protomyth
I'm still a little ticked about Logitech dumping their wired Trackman Wheel
Optical. I love the thumb ball instead of a centered ball. I haven't tried the
wireless version yet.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
I have a M570 (Wireless trackball, thumb ball, as opposed to centered).

I love it. The one thing is that it loses sensitivity when gunk starts to
build up - it becomes harder to move the mouse a pixel or two. But that's
easily fixed by popping out the ball and cleaning it.

The other issue is that I've had to replace the primary mouse button - the
microswitch died.

~~~
pattisapu
The M570 is a very well designed mouse. And sturdy. I've used mine heavily for
about 4 years without a single issue.

------
ulfw
Definitely a severe example of form over function

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michaelbuddy
this article becomes impossible to read to to pretentiousness.

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imkevinxu
Wow I thought this was a post from 2000 or something

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artificialidiot
Is this a satire blog or apple worship reached new heights?

~~~
sp332
It's worship of something, but Andrew Kim isn't an Apple fanboy. If you click
the "Archive" button at the top, you can see products and projects from other
companies too. From the Lumia 920 extended review: _I look forward to mornings
because I love the way light hits the surface. Do I have issues? Probably._

~~~
artificialidiot
Yeah you are right. He worships junk apparently. It is a stupid blog with less
content than the apple marketing material which is taken seriously by some
certain readership.

------
nathanvanfleet
Wow, with this amount of love towards the Apple Pro Mouse you would think that
it could be inserted.

edit: this site has no sense of humour

~~~
mturmon
Little gag replies are risky here. Potty humor like what you've done above
will never be rewarded. It's too easy. Sometimes clever puns or double
entendres will get a couple of upvotes.

This is the correct behavior. Everyone is capable of making little gags, so
they add little to the OP. Not a downvoter, btw.

