I was in Best Buy a little while ago. They sell Apple stuff now – mostly just the Mini (which is adorable in person, btw), but also incidentals like mice and keyboards. On impulse I decided to get one of the Apple-branded mice. Look! It’s pretty!

Its prettiness apparently makes light rays bend around it. Problem is, it’s useless. Why? Bullet time:

• One button. This dosen’t absolutely kill me, as I’ve gotten sort-of halfway used to the click-and-pause action you have to use when using the touchpad, but it’s still a bummer.
• No scrolly wheel. This breaks the bargain. I’m absolutely retarded without a scroll wheel. One would think they’d integrate some of the touchpad tech from the iPod into it, but noooo.

Now, this is the interesting thing. Apple mice are effectively buttonless. “Ah-roo?” you might ask, if you were Scooby Doo. It’s a touch hard to explain, but very easy to see in practice. The top shell of the mouse, the part you put your hand on, is flexibly mounted to a teflon-coated “foot” so to speak, that contains the optical sensor. There’s no button to click, rather the entire mouse seems to tilt downwards slightly to signal your click. This feels rather nice. Here’s the problem with that method – it’s physically impossible to hold the mouse down, pick it up, move it, and set it back down, as is required when you hit the edge of your mousepad or desk. Here’s where the engineers went nuts. In order to solve this fundamental problem with their buttonless mouse, they added two buttons. They’re the little whitish bits on either side of the mouse, about midway up in the picture. They’re not really buttons that you could use for any useful purpose – they’re just little clamps that hold the “foot” in the tilted/clicked position. There’s an entire page in the manual dedicated to teaching you how to use this completely ridiculous mechanism.

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, what we have here is a buttonless, one-button mouse with two buttons.

Now, I can perfectly understand the rationale behind a single-button mouse, having spent many an hour being asked “which click, left click or right click?” by new users. But being faced with a fundamental flaw in the design, rather than dropping back and saying “Maybe we should just add a button”, these engineers pulled out a thoroughly absurd and hackish workaround which completely breaks their age-old “single-control on a mouse” doctrine. I understand wanting to defend a design, but doing so to the detriment of the final product is, well, detrimental.

Bad Apple.

On the other hand, their keyboard is lovely. Has the right number of buttons and everything.

Got a couple more pages turned out for my Xbox article. That thing’s turning into a monster… Other than that I cleaned and watched ATHF.

Also this is really good. 35th Anniversary of Apollo 13