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.
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Comments
What am I supposed to take away from this?
That everyone agrees that your suggestions are absurd. One shouldn’t need to live like Bubble Boy just to use a mouse.
“Dogger Blue, there’s bad and then there’s bad.”
Well I’ve had several mice whose scroll wheels lasted no more than six months before requiring a cleaning—which is always a difficult and annoying process. I haven’t heard any claims for the Mighty Mouse that are significantly quicker to clog than this.
When one of your other scroll wheel mice happens to clog quickly (dust is rather random you know), do you blame the brand manufacturer and start writing articles against them, or do you just think, “Hmm. That was quick. I’d better clean it pretty thoroughly or it’ll happen pretty quickly again.”
I stand by my comments that the problem is with the whole concept of a scroll wheel, which is bound to fail in every mouse I’ve ever used, sooner or later. Many times, sooner. I haven’t noticed any particular being especially vulnerable.
I don’t find “there’s bad and then there’s bad” to be a great counterpoint. It simply makes it clear that although all scroll wheels fail, you’ve decided to take this particular failure personally.
What I meant is I have never, ever encountered a mouse whose scroll wheel was one tenth as likely to clog as the MM’s.
Perhaps I should have written: There’s bad and then there’s DEEPLY FLAWED IN A WAY THAT GOES WAY BEYOND THE FACT THAT “DUST IS RATHER RANDOM”.
The big design flaw it seems to me is that the scroll ball acts essentially like those old rubber balls on the bottom of mice that have long ago gone the way of the dodo. Because they SUCKED. But even then, you could actually take it out to CLEAN those things, which you can’t do with the MM.
I have a scroll wheel on my Logitech and I’ve had it for about three years now. Not only has it not clogged but it shows no signs of clogging and I don’t even see how it could.
But let’s say it did and I had to throw it out and get it a new one. It cost $15. I could buy over three of them before I’m at the cost of just one $50 MM.
i bought the mighty mouse without knowing all the problems it had (poor right-click, unprogrammable buttons, sorry laser, and gummed up scroll ball). mostly, i got it because it was white and matched my pretty white macbook
what logitech needs to do is make a WHITE MX revolution and legions of style-conscious apple-zombies like myself would snap it up in a heartbeat. using a black mouse… i just can’t bring myself to do it.
What if you had a black macbook?