A Brief History of Pain

Introduction

Apple has been making computers for a very long time. Longer than most anyone else that's still in business aside from folks like IBM, though if you narrow the definition of "computer" to "home computer", they're pretty much in a class of their own anymore. Granted their experience with peripherals is a touch shorter than with computer mainboards overall, but in either case they've been in this game for a while. And when you consider that one of their earliest claims to fame was the introduction of the Graphical User Interface to the masses via 1984's Macintosh, you would think that the weight of their hardware development experience would easily have come to bear on the associated user input device, the humble mouse.

While certainly you can forgive teething issues present in the early days of any new technology, Apple has been building mice to accompany a mass-market GUI-based operating system indisputably longer than anyone else on the planet. Product design of that nature is frequently an iterative journey to build upward toward some kind of platonic ideal, and with such a weight of experience in the field you'd expect Apple to be at the forefront of well-designed mice packed with functionality and honed into a perfect usability tool.

And you'd be a fig-witted moron if you thought that was what has actually happened, because Apple mice are - and always have been - among the worst-designed mice available at any given moment. Can you find worse mice? Probably. But even when Microsoft is genuinely trying, they have a hard time creating mice that are actually worse than Apple's. I am a perennial apologist for Apple's insistence on keeping touchscreens away from their computers, but that is 100% down to their expertise with trackpads. If you're limited to using their mice instead... Honestly you're probably better off using a different computer entirely.

The Puck Mouse

Let's not start at the very beginning. As I said it's easy to forgive missteps in the early days of a new technology. Their first mice were boxy and uncomfortable, but nobody understood how to make a good mouse at the time, because nobody fully understood how people would interact with a GUI when they were sitting at a computer for hours on end. In the early days you could navigate a GUI entirely from the keyboard anyway, so reliance on the new input device wasn't nearly as heavy as it has become. Early mice from Apple and other players in the market were basic; a pointing device with buttons. Simple, understandable. Windows introduced context menus eventually, meaning their mice moved on to two or three buttons while Apple's stayed on a single button for ages, but mice in general were shapeless and generic for years and years as hardware designers tried to work their way through the implications of the new input.

No, instead we're going to start at the point where Apple's computers once again started to feel like they'd been designed with intent. The point at which you would expect a company struggling in the throes of impending demise to put their best foot forward, drawing on decades of computer design experience to produce an industry shaking machine like the iMac. This Apple, under the returning leadership of Steve Jobs and boasting the industrial design chops of Jony Ive, came out swinging in 1998 with an eye-catching re-invention of the home desktop computer. Built to distract passers-by and designed around future-facing technologies like USB, the optical drive, and ethernet, the iMac was a herald of things to come for the entire industry.

And this is the mouse that shipped with it. May I present to you the Puck Mouse, a USB mouse from the midst of the PS-not-PlayStation-2 era, built to accompany one of the most forward-looking computers of the day, and without-a-doubt one of the least ergonomic wads of trash ever made. You can still plug these things into a modern computer and use them, because the USB gamble really was an incredibly long-lasting win on Apple's part, if you want to experience the associated pain for yourself. And believe me, you're in for some pain. The Puck Mouse was designed to be looked at, not used, and it's frankly awful. Gripping the thing is an open-door invitation to RSI, and generally you'd be better off trying to interface with your iMac using a literal hockey stick than this stupid thing. Possibly the worst part is that because the iMac was so forward-thinking, you didn't have PS/2 ports you could plug your old mouse into, and odds were pretty good at the time that any replacement USB mice you could even find would be annoyingly expensive.

The Pro Mouse

There is no telling the number of wrists that were eventually destroyed by the Puck Mouse, so when Apple prepared to follow up the iMac with an eye-catching redesign of their professional desktop, the PowerMac, they obviously had to ship it with a new mouse. No, the home-user-intended puck would never do in the hands of a power user, so Apple introduced the Pro Mouse. You know... for kids. And obscure references aside I mean that literally, because once again, the Pro Mouse is a mouse designed to be looked at, not used. I put countless hours in with one of these things on a PowerMac G4 back in the day, and while it is better than the puck, the sacrifices made in comfort and usability to favor design were baffling even when it was new. Mac OS at the time did make use of context menus, menus which would have benefited from having a dedicated right mouse button. But there was no way to make two buttons look good with this incredibly svelte clear shell, so Apple in their infinite wisdom just said "get friendly with the ALT key on your keyboard" and shipped it. Also because the clear shell was unbroken from above, the entire top of the mouse was made to pivot when you clicked. That meant you only had these two little grab-pads on the sides to grip the thing, and you couldn't really rest your palm on it at all for fear of phantom clicks.

There's another thing you might notice missing from the Pro Mouse in terms of functionality; a scroll wheel. The early 2000s were a time of glorious revolution in the world of Windows; XP was redefining the trash fire Microsoft had coded themselves into at the turn of the millennium and the broadening reach of the scroll wheel on the mice of the day was simplifying our relationship with the exploding content of the internet in tangible ways. And while Apple did ease the act of scrolling somewhat in software by placing both navigation buttons next to each other at the bottom of the interface, it was clear that their mouse lagged significantly in terms of functionality. The clear shell, however pretty Jony must have thought it was, simply wasn't sustainable in a world dominated by infinitely vertical webpages. A change was needed, and famously forward-thinking Apple was ready for the next step beyond even that; horizontal scrolling.

The Mighty Mouse

And so it was that nearly a decade after removing the track ball from the bottom of their mice in favor of an optical sensor, a move that vastly improved the usability and reliability, Apple Computers in Cupertino California suffered a collective stroke and put a trackball back in their mouse. Dubbed the Mighty Mouse by a marketing team that is to this day amazingly disconnected from the public perception of their user interface devices, this thing retained the same seamless and fundamentally un-ergonomic design of the pro mouse while still trying to incorporate the feature sets of competing mice in the world of Windows. Sacrifices in the name of functionality include an opaque shell so you can't see the horror show of *GASP* touch sensors enabling right and left click, and a tiny opening in said shell so you can finger the itty-bitty little trackball associated with scrolling.

I call these sacrifices in the name of functionality, but what I really mean is functionality added at the expense of usability. Because the top shell was still seamless, it still pivoted from the back and still couldn't hold the weight of your hand even if your hand was small enough to effectively palm such a low-profile bar of soap. That also meant the only place you could grip the mouse in use was still the contact patches on the sides, but Apple also added force sensitivity to those patches when squeezed. This meant that periodically when you lifted the mouse to reposition it you'd accidentally trigger a hidden click that, unless you configured it deliberately, would do something random like hide all your windows. The track ball also housed a hidden third-mouse-button, which seems like a useful feature until you use the thing and realize that the contact patch for that button is as tiny as the trackball itself, meaning about 40% of the time when you went to use it you'd accidentally trigger a right-or-left click instead.

All that without even acknowledging the fact that track balls are disgusting. There's a reason basically the entire industry ditched these things in favor of solid-state optical sensors in mice as soon as it was even remotely cost-effective to do so. Heck, even modern stationary track-ball mice use an optical sensor to read the movement of the ball rather than reaction wheels! The scroll ball on the Magic Mouse seems great, facilitating smooth scrolling vertically and horizontally at once, until you use it for an hour and realize it's becoming less smooth. Over time the ball would drag the dirt and oils of your fingers under the seamless shell of the mouse where they would build up on the reaction wheels that allowed it to function, causing hitching, a gritty feel to the rotation, and eventually causing the ball to cease functioning. Anyone who ever used a mouse prior to the days of optics knows how to fix this; you pulled the cover off the bottom of the mouse, removed the ball, and cleaned the wheels inside, maybe washing the ball itself in soapy water if you were exceptionally diligent. Given the existence of a standard operating procedure common to the industry at large Apple of course elected to instead make it impossible to easily open the mouse for cleaning. Their recommended procedure for cleaning the Mighty Mouse scroll ball? Rub repeatedly with a damp cloth and pray that it started working again.

The Magic Mouse

The Mighty Mouse was a travesty of poor ergonomics and horrendous reliability resulting in one of the least usable mice of all time. Strangely the growing mountain of experience with mice as interface devices seemed to be making things worse at Apple. Something had to give. Apple needed a mouse that was packed with features but not plagued by the reliability issues of the Mighty Mouse. Deep as they were into revolutionizing the world of touch-screen phones by this point, Apple decided to play to that new-found strength, designing a mouse that was almost entirely solid state with a capacitive touch surface that would enable multi-touch gestures in line with the industry-leading track-pads on their laptops. Their ever-tone-deaf marketing gurus dubbed it the Magic Mouse.

Y-yes. That's uh... that's it.

If you're thinking that looks like possibly the least ergonomic thing you could hold in your hand, you're not entirely accurate. If you grip it like a bar of soap it's not too uncomfortable. If, however, you try to use it like a mouse...

Look, there's no disputing the fact that the multi-touch surface on top of the mouse is great. Software driven inertial scrolling in whatever axis you want, right and left clicks augmented by two and three finger clicks, two and three finger gestures you can map to OS features like spaces or mission control. In terms of functionality this thing absolutely lives up to the claims, while in terms of overall usability it manages to fall below even the ever-low benchmark of, lemme see here... the puck. As you can see the only place to hold on to this thing is here, on the side, directly in the middle, meaning that your fingers are clawed backward into a horrendous position or fully extended in a way that gives me tendonitis just to look at anytime you use it. Because it's wireless it's also significantly heavier than the puck mouse, meaning you have to squeeze harder to reposition it at all. Regardless of any functional gains, the real 'magical' part of this mouse will be the bionic hand surgeries you'll have to have after just a few months of using it, by which point in time you will have gone through probably at least two sets of double-A's powering the thing.

It turns out that loading your mouse up with a capacitive touch surface that's constantly listening for inputs in order to maintain a facsimile of the kind of responsiveness we get with physical buttons and wheels eats up a shocking amount of power, and the Magic Mouse remains one of the shortest-living wireless mice in terms of battery anywhere on earth. Wireless gaming mice with a hundred fully-addressable RGB LEDs last longer than this thing when used approximately 8 hours per day. I lived with a Magic Mouse as my daily-driver at work for about a year before coercing the IT department into buying me something else. I credit that coercion with hundreds of dollars of savings in terms of replacement batteries as well as the ongoing functionality of my wrist.

The Magic Mouse sits at the pinnacle of decades of Apple's pointing devices, the perfect embodiment of absolutely everything you want to avoid when designing a mouse. Perhaps the best part of this story is that Apple, frenetically hurling one-upmanship beers at Microsoft's attempts to make something worse, proceeded to sink somehow below rock-bottom and released the Magic Mouse 2, with a built-in battery. This update was accompanied by exactly zero effort to make the thing more efficient, which means that unlike other wireless mice with built-in batteries you will be charging this thing twice a month instead of twice a year. Let me reiterate; you will be charging this mouse frequently using a lightning port that they put... right there. If this looks like the dumbest mouse in the history of mice to you, congratulations.

You have eyes.

Conclusion

It's clear at this point that even Apple have thrown in the towel on this. Recognizing that they are, despite decades of experience building mice for GUI-based computer systems, actually getting worse with each iteration, they've switched gears to offering up their desktop computers with giant versions of their laptop trackpads, which are themselves still industry-leading. If you insist on using a pointing device built by Apple, those trackpads are the only real option.

But I didn't come here simply to rant. As a long-time user of Apple desktop computers I have intimate familiarity with using each of their mice since the puck in production environments. This is a battle I have been losing for over 20 years. Surely I have some insight to offer on what kind of mouse you should get to accompany your Mac? While certainly that will depend somewhat on the needs of your individual use case, I do have one piece of broadly applicable advice for you folks that use a Mac for hours every day.

If you find yourself asking for the same set of features offered up by the Magic Mouse in the breath you take immediately after hurling that wretched bar of soap into the fires of Mount Doom then look no further than Logitech's MX Master series. Here are mice designed with purpose, enabling the features of something like the magic mouse by way of thoughtfully placed buttons and wheels in a package designed to fit comfortably into the human hand. Here are mice iterated on over time to improve comfort, function, and reliability to the point that the latest, the MX Master 3S, includes subtle alterations to ensure the inertial scroll wheel won't change its feel over time and tactile switches that are both still satisfying to use while being nearly completely silent. Here is a mouse that feels like it was designed by a hardware company that has been there since the beginning.

Which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense.