14 DAY TRIAL // Apple's Mighty Mouse is probably the best mouse ever made. It has multiple programmable functions that are intuitive, it's easy to get accustomed to, and downright a pleasure to use. There's only one problem that has always been reported regarding the little rascal: its scroll-ball gets clogged up with dust, hand grease, and everything else that can get past it to reach the rotary magnets.
Currently, as many as 6 Apple mice have the same symptoms here at Softpedia - ball doesn't scroll vertically anymore. This isn't a new problem occurring with Apple's Mighty Mouse. No sir, not even close. The Internet is filled with guides on how to get your Apple mouse back into working state (some more comprehensive than others). All of them say the same story: the parts handling the scrolling are particularly susceptible to getting clogged up with dirt.
Opening Mighty up is fairly simple:
That was a wireless Mighty getting dissected above. Here's the wired model opened up just below - scroll ball highlighted:
On the Support section of its website, Apple fails to acknowledge the issues surrounding Mighty, and simply offers tips for cleaning the surface of the device, not its inner workings:
Although your Mighty Mouse never needs to be fed or watered, you may occasionally find that you need to clean it. [...] Use a clean lint-free cloth lightly moistened with water. Wipe the ball and the surrounding area, making sure to rotate the ball itself to ensure complete coverage. If the scrolling feels rough or if the scroll ball isn't scrolling up, down, or side-to-side, hold the mouse upside-down and roll the ball vigorously while cleaning it to help dislodge any particles that may have collected on the internal hardware.
The reality is that Apple can't encourage folks to pop open the mouse to clean it, for two reasons:
1 - because it has very small and fragile parts, which users may ultimately even fail to put back together the way they were; 2 - because opening Mighty requires dismembering glued parts.
So why hasn't Apple done anything about it? It may very well be that it's planning to drop the use of mice with its computers for good, paving the way for the world to adopt its multi-touch control system. This may take more time than anyone can guess. But even so, as a hot-shot computer maker, you can't just sit with your arms crossed while your faithful customers are struggling with easily damageable hardware.
Hardware using small, moving parts (and especially that with lots of "crevasses" like Apple's Mighty) is predisposed to getting clogged up with dirt, worn out, and ultimately damaged. But let's not forget that the tech-savvy blokes working in the Cupertino labs must have put some serious thought into how Apple's mouse should be designed. This also means there are some issues that simply can't be worked around (with the technology at hand) that easily, or that cheap. Plus, there's a limit to what mice can accomplish as one-hand controlling devices.
In conclusion, if there's anyone who can find a good solution to pointing, clicking, moving a cursor and scrolling a page up and down, left to right, it's still Apple. The company has proven over the years that it can deliver on promise, and even on what it doesn't promise. So, Apple, if you are not planning to drop Mighty just yet, why not invest some time in making your ingeniously-crafted device work for more than a few months without breaking?
Note: We can all agree Apple probably doesn't want to give up on the concepts surrounding Mighty, but this is only as far as we can go, as users of the company's computing solutions.
Have you had a bad experience with Apple's Mighty Mouse? How many of you have managed to fix it and bring it back into working state, or broke it following the cleaning guides on the web?