Mechanical Mice equivalent?

[Muirium]

This is not a sub. But you are a spammer.

Why are so many numpties asking for "mechanical mice" on Reddit, anyway? Are theirs too "mushy?" Dread to think quite how they got that way…

[oofers]

This is not a sub. But you are a spammer.

Why are so many numpties asking for "mechanical mice" on Reddit, anyway? Are theirs too "mushy?" Dread to think quite how they got that way…

I guess they want an "enthusiast" mouse, something higher level than standard gaming mice.

[Muirium]

If we ever get to the point “vintage” nice are going for four figures too, I’ll know we’ve reached true Idiocracy.

[micmil]

If we ever get to the point “vintage” nice are going for four figures too, I’ll know we’ve reached true Idiocracy.

But don't ya know that roller mice just have a better FEEEEEEEEL?!? Plus you get the joy of scraping cat hair, skin flakes, and questionable semi-liquid substances off the ball every few days.

[Findecanor]

Technically, Roller mice don't have hairy balls ...

[Muirium]

…because they have hairy shafts.

What can I say? Nature just made some of us that way.

[robo]

There's good reason people covet vintage keyboards and not vintage mice. Or monitors. Or anything else that has demonstrably improved over the years.

(Yes, i know collectors and nostalgic people exist, but nobody is using a C64 at work or claiming it's better than a modern machine)

[Findecanor]

There are people who are using somewhat older computers for work though.
One reason is because those not being able to run modern Internet browsers relieves the users of distractions. Another is they are used to a certain installation and workflow.

There's good reason people covet vintage keyboards and not vintage mice.

Does anyone make "retro" USB mice in the style of the old, boxy ones from the 80s?

Or monitors.

I've met competitive FPS gamers who used (now "vintage") CRTs instead of flatscreen monitors to avoid the latency inherent in most flatscreen monitors. That was before high-refresh rate LCDs became common though.

Sometimes progress takes a two step back, before going forwards again. The world of keyboards could be said to be an example of that effect: the dark times when the only mechanical keyboards were vintage or some creaky Cherry G80.
Another example is boot times: which had become horribly long before OS improvements, SSDs and then NVMe SSDs.

[Yasu0]

I stuck to roller mice way after they were gone. The early opticals had some issues for picky users, but the late model optical mice perform really well. Really really well.

[joebeazelman]

I have a few old Microsoft roller mice with two buttons and scroll wheel along with a few Macintosh single-button ones. The metal ball gives them a nice heft making them feel more substantial compared to the optical ones. They're actually enjoyable to use until they become constipated with mouse droppings and must disemboweled and cleaned.

Believe it or not, my first mouse was a Mouse Systems optical mouse for my PCjr. It required a metal mouse pad with a grid pattern. It came with a slow and barely usable PC Paintbrush software. What I really wanted was IBM ColorPaint which came in a cartridge and was almost as good as MacPaint, but it cost $99. It was a real bummer trying to turn my computer into a Macintosh, which cost well over $2500 and had a measly 128K of RAM.

[Findecanor]

I have a few old Microsoft roller mice with two buttons and scroll wheel along with a few Macintosh single-button ones.

Microsoft and Apple never made roller mice. They made ball mice.

[joebeazelman]

While I normally use the term ball mice, I used the term interchangeably with roller because several posts here seem to use it to refer to ball mice. They were also commonly called mechanical mice because they use rotary encoders attached to rollers for sensing the ball's positioning, instead of an optical camera. Technically, they are just as much roller mice as they are ball mice, since the roller is just as much, if not more, a part of its fundamental mechanism as the ball itself.

[Findecanor]

Because the rotary encoders in 99% of all ball mice use optical sensing, the mice are often also called "optomechanical mice".

BTW. here is a picture of a wheel mouse:

honeywell01.jpg (25.49 KiB) Viewed 58061 times

[Yasu0]

If I had a good ball mouse I would run it as a daily.. more power to anybody who wants to do it. You do have to clean the rollers which is no big deal. Also if you stop on a dime or go zero to a hundred sometimes the ball inertia can keep the cursor from doing what you want for a split second. Which is also not a big deal. Other than that, there are not any downsides that I can remember. Maybe the "feel" is a little better with the ball, but I don't remember enough to say. I have some ball mice but only early ones, I would want to try a late model ball mouse for a more fair comparo with opticals. Which I have sold or trashed all of those.

[hellothere]

If we ever get to the point “vintage” mice are going for four figures too, I’ll know we’ve reached true Idiocracy.

I just wanted to remind Mu that this exists: https://www.realforce.co.jp/products/RFM01U11

Here are your five figure mice: https://rarest.org/stuff/expensive-computer-mice

[Muirium]

Expected handmade Engelbart. Found fake Gucci.

[soylentday]

But there are few options available, am I right?
For example the Mousetrapper from sweden, it's mechanical.

[Findecanor]

The very first device branded "Mousetrapper" was indeed only mechanical in its position-sensor. It worked like a Rollermouse but had no sensor of its own: you had to "trap" a Microsoft mouse into it, and mount it so that the ball touched the roller. By moving the roller, you rolled the mouse's ball.

Then the brand was reused for optomechanical trackpads. Those work like a Rollermouse but instead of the roller being able to slide left and right, it has a sled that can slide left and right. The sled has two rollers with a conveyor belt suspended between them. The sensor in both a Rollermouse and a Mousetrapper are an optical sensor of the same type as in an optical mouse.

BTW, I'm a stickler for correct computer terminology and I think that "mouse" means only a relative-position device with at least one button that can slide around on a mouse-mat. Other things are other things.