When I woke up this morning, I thought that something was different. I could feel a change in the Force. The world was different now.
Gallery

There you got it folks: a multi-button mouse from Apple. There. Now shaddup. Seriously.

I was around in the 90s when all the lies were thrown around about what was wrong about the Mac OS, and how Windows was the great savior. Among those targets that anti-Apple people used, the processor and hardware were the two biggest, annoyingist, things that they would bring up.

What they could never explain was how those innovations (three button mice, Intel processors, etc.) would actually help me work. In fact, those gripes never made it past the first minute with me. First, I would point at their mouse and say, "when did you buy that? And where's the mouse that came with the computer?" I would then ask, "what's the GPU throughput for virtual memory?"

Yes, I know that GPU isn't the CPU, but they didn't. In fact, I often made stuff up to help their argument, only to embarrass them by telling them the advantage they thought they had was something I just made up. I spent the better part of the 90s correcting the gross inaccuracies from people who didn't know what they were talking about.

The mouse thing has always annoyed me. I've used an Apple supplied mouse for about a month, total. Then again, when a new mouse technology comes out, I get it, and that wouldn't change if Apple came out with a mouse that wasn't as good as the one I have.
360 Degree Scrolling

Right now my mouse has 16 buttons on it, and it's from Logitech. I've gotten a lot of Logitech mouses over the years. Microsoft mouses, and Kensington, too. I got the first scroll wheel mouse, and then the laser mice. I'm just following the innovation.

Now, Apple's got a trackball on the mouse. Full 360° movement. An innovation. I will probably get one.

Earlier this year Apple announced that they are moving to Intel processors. Now they've got a multi-button mouse. We'll have a new Mac OS X by the time that Windows Vista comes out. Apple is innovating.

Well, more accurately, they are copying. They are looking at what other people are doing, and then doing it their way, and making it look fabulous. They took RSS in the browser like FireFox, and made it look perfect. They took podcatching and made it brain-dead simple. Now they're making the hardware that people have been using for years work with the Mac OS.

I woke up this morning, and the world changed. And I think that it was a good thing.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-11-01T02:43:39.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
cms: wordpress
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