Apple's Mighty Mouse 



This blog is nothing but eclectic. So I thought I should drop a note about Apple Computer's new product, the Mighty Mouse.

The Mighty Mouse is a multi-button mouse, and each button can be programmed to perform different functions. This is no big innovation, others have made mice like this for years. There are two things different about the Mighty Mouse:

(1) it has only one internal button, and it determines the nature of the mouse click using the resistance of electric current on the part of the mouse you click, using the same technology as laptop trackpads. For example, when you press down with a left-click, the mouse can tell that your finger is on the left side and sends a left-click to the computer. In theory there are fewer moving parts and the Mighty Mouse ought to last longer than a mouse with two or more actual physical buttons.

(2) it has a scroll ball, not a scroll wheel, and the ball allows you to scroll horizontally as well as vertically. Apparently you can combine these motions to scroll diagonally, too, but I haven't been able to master that. The scroll ball itself is very small, but has a great tactile feel to it. The scroll ball works quite well and is an improvement over the scroll wheels out there already.

The downside to the Mighty Mouse? Price. $49 is a lot of money for a mouse, even one that lets you do diagonal scrolling.

The Mighty Mouse is aimed at graphic designers, editing large pictures in Photoshop. If you zoom in to do some retouching, you will frequently need to scroll around both horizontally and vertically. The Mighty Mouse lets you do that with a simple finger movement, instead of dragging the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the window.

But for other users, non-power users, the extra features on the Mighty Mouse are pretty useless. If you don't need the horizontal scrolling, the $20-30 price premium over other mice is not justified. My old Kensington "Mouse-in-a-Box" with two buttons and a scroll wheel works just fine, thank you. And it only cost $15.

I measure all products on the hype-to-substance (or "HS") ratio. An excellent product has a HS ratio approaching or exceeding 1:1. This is a difficult test for Apple -- because the hype surrounding Apple products is enormous, Apple has to put some real substance in a new product to avoid a HS ratio of 10:1 or worse.

I would assign a dangerously high HS ratio to the Mighty Mouse of about 9:1 -- reflecting lots of hype for a mouse which is overpriced and has unique features which benefit only a small subset of users.

(For comparative purposes, the Mendoza line for hype-to-substance is a ratio of 10:1. No product has ever scored worse on the HS ratio than Microsoft Word 6 for the Mac - it had no new useable features than the previous version, it was dog slow even on relatively fast Macs, and it was heavily hyped by Microsoft. Lots of hype with zero substance produced an HS ratio of infinity).  

Posted: Wed - August 24, 2005 at 04:05 PM        

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