Apple has just reinvented the mouse and, damn, is it hot.
The Mighty Mouse has no buttons or, depending on how you look at it, three. Instead of a scroll wheel, it has a trackpad built into the top of it. And inside the trackpad, there’s a trackball. And the whole thing can detect if it’s squeezed.
Of course, it’s optical. And it has a built-in speaker, so your mouse can…er…squeak, as a UI indicator.
Mouse. Trackpad. Trackball. Speaker. All in one. I love it.
I have just a couple complaints about it. One, the price (but that is to be expected). Two, it isn’t wireless; having just purchased a third-party wireless mouse and keyboard, I can say that I like the freedom that they give me. Otherwise, this product is an excellent idea. I guess we’ll see how many Mac users bite.
One can easily predict a wireless version of the new mouse, with a few other performance and productivity boosts, in a few months. It is the industry sales model, both PC and Mac, to trot out every incremental improvement, sell it for a while, then move onward and upward, to sell that for a while. Jumping to the next “final” version, without selling partial steps along the way, looses some of the profit potential.