The Mighty Mouse has recently been given extraordinary amount of attention for a mouse.  And in fact, it does promise a lot.   According to its designer’s (this is what Apple calls itself) website, the mouse includes a new "revolutionary" scroll ball in the place of the traditional scroll wheel.  There are also two sensitive buttons and two more (rather hard) left and right programmable ones on the side.  The scroll ball allows navigating from left to right, and up and down in documents, as well as diagonally.   As for the technical and practical side of this product, although it isn’t obvious this is indeed a two button mouse (right and left click detected thanks to sensors that locate the position of your fingers).  It’s capable of rapid communication with your computer at a frequency of 125 Hz (not announced by Apple but our measurement).  In general, USB mice can’t go beyond this rate.

PC users will be disappointed

All of this is great; however, for the other 98 % of non Mac users out there, the enthusiasm will be dampened.  This is because the "PC compatibility" announced by Apple signifies only that, yes, this mouse can be connected to your PC via the USB port.  The disappointing side is that all of these functions are only compatible with Mac OS X, and even then, it’s with the 10.4.2 version that you have access to all parameters.  On a PC, the scroll ball allows vertical scrolling and that’s it.  The second cold shower is that buttons on the side do not function.  Overall, it’s just too bad that Apple made so little effort for PC users and due to the lack of drivers this high end mouse is finally transformed into a rather basic product with two buttons and a vertical scroll ball.  By the way, the latter sputters a bit when it rolls.  It’s better than nothing in games when used to go through of your cache of arms, for example, however, it’s far from the comfort of a click-to-click scrolling with a scroll wheel.

After this, even if Apple is often synonymous with graphic artists we have a hard time recommending this mouse for this purpose even if its scrolling system is practical in large photos.  Apple doesn’t give the resolution of its sensor, however, we are guessing it’s a max of 800 dpi (we even think it’s below this figure).  Even when the pointer is set to its maximum speed, movement appears slow on large screens.  This mouse is best suited for personal use on a screen at the most in 1280 x 1024, and to cut out or finely touch up images on a bigger screen (20 inch monitors and higher) we think there are better products.   Finally in terms of its sliding ability, the Mighty mouse is satisfactory but not overly impressive for a new mouse.  For example, our MX518 glides as well even after several months of intensive use.

One last shady detail was that the model we received squeaks – like a real mouse!  The left click produces a sound that could drive the compulsive clicker crazy.