Apple USB Mouse (1998)
The original iMac's round mouse: one button, a mechanical ball and a translucent Bondi blue shell, nicknamed the "hockey puck", as remembered for its shape as for the criticism it drew.
© Factory · CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗ Resized, no crop or retouching.
Specs
| Connectivity | USB · mechanical ball · one button |
| Price | bundled with the iMac ($1,299) |
| Key feature | Apple's first USB mouse |
Launch
Apple announced it on May 6, 1998 at the Flint Center on the De Anza College campus in Cupertino, as part of the iMac introduction: the official press release, preserved in a MacTech reproduction, listed the Apple USB Keyboard and Apple USB Mouse in the box. That day Jobs called the iMac "the Internet-age computer for the rest of us" and pitched it as next year's computer for $1,299, not last year's for $999. The mouse arrived with the iMac in August 1998: round, translucent and Bondi blue to match the computer, with a single button and a USB connector, Apple's first mouse with that port instead of the longstanding ADB. Excerpts of the event survive in an archival copy on the Internet Archive.
Marketing
No campaign of its own is documented: it was advertised inside the iMac campaign, Apple's largest up to that point according to 9to5Mac, with an estimated spend of around $100 million in 1998. The TV and print ads came from agency TBWA Chiat/Day with Jeff Goldblum as spokesman, as Adweek's October 1998 critique describes, and the internally produced "Simplicity Shootout" film premiered at Macworld Expo New York in July 1998, introduced on stage by Jobs himself: a seven-year-old boy got an iMac up and running and online long before an MBA student managed the same with a Windows 95 PC. In those pieces the mouse appeared as part of the matching set. Archival copies of those ads survive on social media; one of them, "Three steps", is on YouTube in an unofficial upload by the Apple Archive channel.
Flaws and fixes
The perfectly round shape made it hard to orient without looking, and its size felt small for many hands; the cable, designed to plug into the keyboard, ran short for other uses. Apple later added a dimple on the button so users could feel which way it pointed. A small remedies market appeared: shells like the iCatch that gave it an oblong body, and adapters like Griffin's iMate that let people keep using the older ADB mouse. In 2008 Wired magazine listed it among "Apple's most notorious flops". With the colored iMacs of 1999 it came in matching fruit tones, and in July 2000 Apple replaced it with the Apple Pro Mouse, optical and oblong, unveiled at Macworld Expo New York, where keynote attendees got one free, and standard on the new desktop computers.
