Thursday, August 04, 2005

Apple's archrival Microsoft has been making two-button models since its first mouse hit the marketplace a few months after Apple's in 1983, and models with a scroll wheel since 1996.

On Tuesday, Apple finally gave in -- sort of. The company released an optional, add-on mouse called Mighty Mouse that allows right-clicking and scrolling. But in a stubborn homage to the old dogma, Apple designed the Mighty Mouse so it looks like, and can work like, a one-button mouse. Those clashing design goals make the Mighty Mouse harder to use than competing mice.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has also brought out a new mouse in the past few weeks, the Wireless Optical Mouse 5000. It isn't as slick-looking as Apple's new entry, but it's better, in my view. The Microsoft mouse has an innovation: It allows you to instantly magnify any portion of your screen without zooming into the whole display. That's a great help to people doing detail work, not to mention to the increasing number of baby boomers with declining vision.

Microsoft's new model is cordless, like most modern, premium mice. Apple's Mighty Mouse is tethered to the computer with a cord, like most low-end models.

Macintosh fan sites on the Web are already hailing [the Mighty Mouse] as another of Apple's brilliant design coups. It's not. In my tests, I found that the design makes right-clicking slower and clumsier than on a typical Microsoft or Logitech mouse with real buttons. (These non-Apple mice work perfectly on Macs.)

[We found that] right-clicking with the Mighty Mouse was unpredictable. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. We needed to press the right side repeatedly to get a single right click, slowing us down and annoying us, well, mightily.

So, stop the presses: Microsoft has beaten Apple on hardware design, at least in this one case.