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Apple falls into "build a better mouse" trap

Apple falls into "build a better mouse" trap

Molly Wood Former Executive Editor
Molly Wood was an executive editor at CNET, author of the Molly Rants blog, and host of the tech show, Always On. When she's not enraging fanboys of all stripes, she can be found offering tech opinions on CBS and elsewhere, and offering opinions on everything else to anyone who will listen.
Molly Wood
Did you know the Mac operating system has supported contextual menus (what Windows folks call "right-click menus") since OS 8.6? Yep. You just Ctrl+click to reach them. Yet, despite this capability, which persists to powerful effect in Mac OS X, Apple has refused ever to ship a two-button mouse. And it still refuses. Instead, in the oh-so-Apple way, the company has invented an all-new mouse, called the Mighty Mouse (do we smell a lawsuit?).

The new mouse looks like a standard one-click Mac mouse, but it has touch-sensitive sides so that it can detect a right- or left-click, and it features a tiny gray trackball that serves as a scrollwheel. Some other small buttons on the side, apparently, let you access features unique to Mac OS X Tiger. Why Mighty Mouse, instead of a standard, easily recognizable mouse with two buttons and some sort of pan-scrolling capability, the likes of which exist across the peripherals universe? Well, obviously, Apple says, those mice are too hard to use. Seriously. A mouse is so hard to use that you have to go and design a new, spectacularly unergonomic one with buttons in places mice have never had buttons, instead of just putting one extra button on the existing mouse? I will sincerely never understand this company.