Mighty Mouse Must Die!

Brace yourselves, folks, as this is one writer who is in no mood to praise Apple today. The Mighty Mouse I proudly purchased back in September 2005 is giving me more grief than an ingrown toenail (never had one but I assume it’s unpleasant), and even after having it replaced by Apple it still gives me grief.

Last summer I moaned about how my first Mighty Mouse had given me a huge headache with the abysmal scroll wheel design and its poor quality optical laser, although the latter issue wasn’t one that was bothering me as much as the former.

What am I talking about? The scroll wheel just loves to get clogged up with dirt at some point or other and even after doing the old trick of holding the mouse upside down and frantically scrolling the wheel back and forth with my clean index finger, it still gets clogged up and makes itself virtually unusable—we’re not in the 90s any more, I don’t want to manually use the scroll bar in Firefox.

After my first Mighty Mouse got so clogged up I could no longer clean it, I took a trip down to my local Apple Store (Regent Street, London) where they swiftly replaced it and apologised for the inconvenience. This was all well and good but less than a year later I’m now in the same horrible sinking boat I was in before: the wheel is once again clogged up.

I came to the conclusion that it must just be a bad design. I wash my hands many times throughout the day, sometimes too many, and yet the wheel still eventually gets clogged up with dirt. Now sure, I could keep returning to the Apple store once a year to get my mouse replaced free of charge, but I shouldn’t have had to go back the first time. So what did I do? I took the mouse apart and fixed it myself.

After following a ridiculous guide on Apple’s support page on how to clean the mouse, which followed the same routine I mentioned above, I decided to follow a slightly better guide on CreativeBits which shows how to disassemble the Mighty Mouse and give the ball and its surroundings a good clean. It took a lot of patience, especially trying to cut the base ring without snapping it completely, but I managed to do it and the mouse worked wonderfully afterward.

Well, for all of two months, that is. Yes, just last week I was casually browsing Apple Matters when, you guessed it, the scroll wheel stopped working once more. I tried Apple’s technique of cleaning but this time the ball wasn’t moving at all—I’m guessing there’s either a piece of cheese stuck down there where my little niece mistook it for a real mouse, or one of the pins has popped out.

I now refuse to take this absurd piece of white and grey garbage back to the Apple store to get it replaced again and there’s no chance of me actually using it again—I managed to get so fed up by it that I’ve launched it directly into our recycle bin!

I started to have a think about how Apple could solve this problem, although no doubt the cost of the already over-priced Mighty Mouse will surely increase further. Considering the Mighty Mouse doesn’t actually have any movable parts, other than the scroll wheel, why doesn’t Apple introduce a touch pad in the middle of the mouse, similar to that found on the iPod or a MacBook, and have that act as a scroll wheel? I’d be happy to pay slightly more for this, knowing that something as simple as dirt won’t be clogging it up and removing one of the device’s main functions.

My point in this article is to see how many others out there are having the same trouble I’ve had. After browsing a few webpages I’ve come across comments whereby users have also had trouble with the pathetic little scroll wheel and have, as such, thrown the device in the bin. Considering Apple now ships the entire iMac range with a Mighty Mouse, I know that a large majority of folks out there must own one.

Feel free to vote in the poll below and leave a comment telling us of your experiences, good or bad. If you’re unhappy with your Mighty Mouse, perhaps you’ve got a valid suggestion on how to rectify the problem once and for all? Let us know.