Apple's Buttonless Mouse Came From Steve Jobs' Misunderstanding

&gt; The Pro Mouse also ditched the dust-collecting ball underneath a standard mouse in favor of an LED for fully solid-state optical tracking. &quot;As far as I&#x27;m aware, we were the first consumer company to do that,&quot; Farag said.<p>Sorry, but no. From wikipedia: &quot;The first modern optical computer mice were the Microsoft IntelliMouse with IntelliEye and IntelliMouse Explorer, introduced in 1999 using technology developed by Hewlett-Packard.&quot; Also, the Intellimouse Explorer is a legendary mouse which deserves its own article. I still own two of them and use one daily (3.0 version).

&gt; While there are many users, gamers in particular, who shy away from Apple&#x27;s buttonless offerings<p>Many? I have yet to come across a single person who likes any of the Mighty Mouse models that Apple produced. They are all reviled and considered some of the worst mice that were ever created by a hardware company.<p>Steve Jobs was no genius, he got a few things very right and quite a few others very, very wrong.

This reminds me of how when Apple created the UI for the Lisa (and then the Mac), they thought that on the original Xerox Alto, windows could overlap, so Quickdraw had to handle overlapping windows [0]: “Smalltalk didn&#x27;t even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn&#x27;t draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front.”<p>I thought I read somewhere that Jobs specifically asked for this, (mis)remembering having seen it at PARC, but I cannot find the quote at the moment.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&amp;story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.folklore.org&#x2F;StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&amp;story...</a>

I expected to read an article about how awful the Magic Mouse is, since I don&#x27;t like the current Apple offerings of mice—at all. I find them poorly fitting and quirky (holding a mouse with just the tips of my fingers doesn&#x27;t work for me). OTOH, I love their trackpads and find any other laptop trackpad almost impossibly insensitive and powerless.<p>I, however, really enjoyed their previous mouse offerings. So I was glad to see innovation happens the old fashioned way. An &quot;Oops.&quot; An &quot;Oh wait…&quot; Then a &quot;This is genius!&quot;<p>Edit: grammar.

The article&#x2F;interviewee suggests it was the first mainstream optical mouse, launched in 2000. Didn&#x27;t the Intellimouse have it around 1999, plus a scrollwheel? I remember using a range of Microsoft mice going back many years and they were pretty well known.<p>Actually, the Wheel Mouse Optical I still use today is from late-2000, I think. For a while in the middle, I used one of the darker grey Explorers before returning to the lighter and older version.<p>Anyone else remember round&#x2F;puck mice from before that Apple one, mid-1990s? First encountered that shape of mouse in a Unix lab.

Apple mice are comically frustrating to use. I&#x27;d rather carry around a mouse of my own than use one of those pieces of crap.<p>Edit: even more funny is the &quot;Magic&quot; Trackpad. Watching people mouse around on big desktop monitors at the speed of molasses with one of those always cracks me up. The only &quot;magic&quot; in it is that it makes any mouse-intensive work take twice as long to complete.

Typical Apple anecdote.<p>Form over function? Check.<p>Enraged know it all CEO? Check.<p>Claiming it invented a mouse when it didn&#x27;t? Check.

There are plenty of &quot;crazy Steve Jobs&quot; stories that make him look like a brilliant visionary. This is not one of those.

This looks like a rewrite of the 9to5Mac article for page views.

Classic Steve. Form first, function if you have time later.

&gt;&quot;What changed his mind was that he felt that users were finally ready to embrace an interface that had contextual menus and multiple buttons that did different things,&quot; Farag explained.<p>That was always the thing with Jobs. You would never see a feature until <i>he</i> felt that you were ready for it.

There are many technical people who hate the one-button mouse, but the design is perfect for users who are not comfortable with computers.<p>Furthermore, after years of reading contemptuous comments about this design, and now this article (and associated discussion), it must really have taken a genius to perceive something beyond the conceptual resistance (unconscious, even) of those surrounding him. It&#x27;s the same process that leads to new paradigms.<p>Imagine that: making computers <i>easy</i>. Pffft.

Interesting read, but did anyone else find it annoying that the article didn&#x27;t include any pictures of the &#x27;zero button&#x27; mouse?<p>My first Apple was an MBP, so I don&#x27;t know what the first Apple Pro Mouse looked like, turns out it was this - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pro_Mouse" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Apple_Pro_Mouse</a>

The article&#x27;s title makes a daring statement. The possessive of a name ending in s usually uses &#x27;s:<p>James&#x27;s Forbes&#x27;s<p>Omitting the s after an apostrophe is usually reserved for historical or Biblical names (because historically they were pronounced the same as the bare word, as opposed to current pronunciation with the extra -ez sound):<p>Socrates&#x27; Moses&#x27; Jesus&#x27; Jobs&#x27; (?)

When you&#x27;ve nailed so many things so right in your career, you tend to believe in your opinion even when you&#x27;ve got something totally wrong.