Apple Pro Mouse (2000)
The answer to the " hockey puck ": Apple's first optical mouse, oblong and wrapped in clear plastic, without a single visible button; you clicked by pressing the whole shell down.
© All About Apple Museum · CC BY-SA 2.5-it ↗ Resized, no crop or retouching.
Specs
| Connectivity | USB · optical · whole-body click |
| Price | standard with desktop Macs; $59 separately |
| Key feature | first optical mouse standard across an entire desktop line |
Launch
Apple introduced it on July 19, 2000 at Macworld Expo New York, in the same keynote that debuted the Power Mac G4 Cube; the keynote recording survives on the Internet Archive. According to a later Macworld retrospective, Jobs held up a press headline calling the previous mouse, the "hockey puck", the worst mouse ever made, and promised to change that. Apple's official release boasted that Apple was the first company to ship an optical mouse standard on all its desktop computers, and Jobs said no competitor did, "much less one that costs $799". Jobs also announced that attendees would take one home for free, though per TidBITS only the 4,000 people in the main auditorium had vouchers under their seats and the 3,000 in the overflow room went without. It was also sold separately from September, for $59.
Marketing
No dedicated ad campaign is on record: its showcase was the keynote itself and the fact that it came standard with every new desktop, from the $799 iMac to the Power Mac G4, per Apple's official release. Design did the rest: the black body under a thick layer of clear plastic followed the same transparent-case motif as the Power Mac G4 Cube unveiled that same day, and the absence of buttons and ball was the visible proof of the jump to optical tracking, as a Macworld retrospective noted. The click tension could be adjusted, an idea Apple advertised at the time and dropped from later models because it was barely noticeable.
Flaws and fixes
The cable was still short and prone to failure with use, as the Macworld retrospective records; Apple came to bundle USB extension cables with desktop computers, a practice of the era documented by Wikipedia. The clear plastic scratched easily. Pressing the whole body down to click often moved the pointer right at the moment of clicking, and the tension adjustment was hard to notice. While the rest of the industry had settled on two buttons and a scroll wheel, Apple stuck with a single click and no wheel, and reviewers kept pointing it out. A 2003 refresh turned it white, dropped the click-force dial and the "Pro" name, and that same year a Bluetooth wireless version appeared, the Apple Wireless Mouse, per the record collected by Wikipedia. In August 2005 the Mighty Mouse replaced it as Apple's mouse, per Apple's 2005 release.
