Mighty Mouse (2005)
Apple's first multi-button mouse after 22 years of one-button mice: four programmable controls and a scroll ball that rolled in any direction, without giving up the single-piece shell.
© Feureau · CC BY-SA 3.0 ↗ Resized, no crop or retouching.
Specs
| Connectivity | USB 1.1/2.0 |
| Price | $49 |
| Key feature | Magic Mouse (2009) |
Launch
Apple introduced Mighty Mouse on August 2, 2005, on sale that same day for $49, per Apple's official release. It was its first multi-button mouse: since the 1983 Lisa, 22 years earlier, Apple had sold only one-button mice, as Wikipedia records. The enclosure remained a single piece with no visible buttons, but touch sensors told left and right clicks apart, the scroll ball could be pressed, and squeezing the sides activated a fourth control. It connected over USB to Macs and PCs. The announcement came as a press release.
Marketing
The pitch was having it both ways: more functions without losing the simplicity of a one-button mouse. David Moody, Apple's vice president of Mac product marketing, summed it up at launch, per Apple's official release: Apple had simply built a better mouse, one that added functionality while retaining the elegant, easy-to-use design. The four controls could be programmed in Mac OS X 10.4.2 Tiger to open Spotlight, Dashboard or Exposé with one touch, and the 360-degree ball aimed at people editing video or music. On Windows it worked as a standard four-button mouse.
Flaws and fixes
The scroll ball clogged with dirt until it stopped responding, and cleaning it without taking the mouse apart was difficult; in 2009 TechCrunch publicly asked Apple to fix it. The sensors could not register both sides at once: a right-click required lifting the left finger, and the chording used by CAD software was out, as Wikipedia's entry explains. The signature click sound came from a tiny internal speaker and could not be disabled. The trademark dispute was decisive too: Man & Machine sued Apple over the Mighty Mouse name in 2008, and in October 2009 Apple renamed the mouse the Apple Mouse. The 2006 wireless model was replaced by the Magic Mouse in 2009, but the wired one stayed on sale until June 2017.