Matias makes a mouse

[Findecanor]

I had a PowerMac G4 back in the 90s. You pull the handle the side and it just folds down on it's hinge with the whole motherboard exposed.

... I don't much like the look of it, ...

We're going a bit off-topic now, but ... IMHO, it looks great when painted white, with black accents or not.

[joebeazelman]

HIDeous mouse! It looks like a fat lab rat rescued from a trap, but still partially flattened. Matias is no Matisse to say the least.

[Muirium]

Yeah. I barely noticed when I first opened the thread, though. “Matias made this? Checks out.”

Could be worse: they’re not aping the looks of 20 year old Apple mice at least.

[apastuszak]

I don't think it looks bad at all. Could be worse. Could look like the Magic Mouse.

[Muirium]

Hard disagree.

[Findecanor]

What matters most is how it feels in the hand when you use it, not how it looks.

[Muirium]

Correct. Looks are secondary, though not entirely irrelevant.

Grip is the thing that makes mice so wildly different from one another. Finger grip users, like me, go for low profile mice like the Magic Mouse (whose multitouch top surface is very useful for me indeed). Palm grip users go for much larger rodents like the Intelimouse Explorer I mentioned earlier, which I had back at the turn of the century.

This Matias mouse reminds me more of those larger, palm grip mice, which is a good choice for them, given their Mac focus and Apple’s own indifference to this preference.

[apastuszak]

Correct. Looks are secondary, though not entirely irrelevant.

Grip is the thing that makes mice so wildly different from one another. Finger grip users, like me, go for low profile mice like the Magic Mouse (whose multitouch top surface is very useful for me indeed). Palm grip users go for much larger rodents like the Intelimouse Explorer I mentioned earlier, which I had back at the turn of the century.

This Matias mouse reminds me more of those larger, palm grip mice, which is a good choice for them, given their Mac focus and Apple’s own indifference to this preference.

It's definitely a personal preference when it comes to mice. I REALLY don't like the Magic Mouse. I really tried to like it. I even bought this for it:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRL6LQX4



At this point in my peripheral device journey, I mostly use trackballs. I don't understand how everyone doesn't use a trackball. But them I talk to a lot of people that just HATE trackballs.

The big pluses for me with this mouse are:

1. It's PBT
2. It'd doesn't have any of that grippy stuff that turns all sticky on it.
3. The scroll wheel is aluminum and not that gripply plastic that will eventually get all sticky.

I posted about this mouse on another forum and people sh!t all over it without even having tried it. They immediately poo-pooed the switches, saying they were garbage and would not last 50 million clicks, even though nowhere in the literature does Matias ever say the exaxt Omron switch they're using.

I think this mouse is curiosity and "worthy of mention." I have a whole drawer full of mice. Optical sensors and switches rarely go bad. What almost always happens is the ABS gets worn from your hard rubbing against it in spots, and the grippy material gets very sticky.

This design should eliminate both those issues.

It would be nice if companies made mice that were repairable by some more advanced used users. Instead of soldering the buttons to the PCB, put sockets in and pop them in the sockets. Then end-users could pop them out when the switch wears out and pop a new one in. Make the screw holes on the bottom easily accessible and don't cover them with the pads that let the mouse slide around.

[Findecanor]

It's definitely a personal preference when it comes to mice. I REALLY don't like the Magic Mouse. I really tried to like it. I even bought this for it:

Spoiler:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRL6LQX4

Seeing that made me laugh out loud ...

Reminds me of a third-party accessory you could buy for the circular "puck mouse" that Apple shipped with the first iMac back in the day. There were at least two different brands of plastic shells that clipped onto the mouse, providing an elongated shape so you could actually point with the thing. Edit: here's one. (Difficult to find persistent images...)

[apastuszak]

Oh how I loathed that puck mouse. I bought the first ever PoweMac G4 and it came with one of those mice in light and dark grey. The day after the PowerMac G4 came in, I was driving to Best Buy to buy a Logitech mouse.

When it comes to the current Magic Mouse 2, I can see how some people like it. Apple still makes it, so somebody is obviously buying it. But there is NO EXCUSE for the Lightning charging port to be on the bottom of the mouse. I've heard Apple apologists claim that it's "no big deal," because a 15 minute charge will get you all-day battery life and then you just charge it overnight. So, you take a coffee break and you come back and use your mouse. Um, no.

It's as bad as the Logitech mouse that you had to put in the provided cradle to charge. I know the logic was that you would drop it the cradle every day when you went home and you'd never need to worry about it going dead. In practice, I only remembered to drop it in the dock when it stopped working.

I guarantee you, if the Magic Mouse 2 was developed while Steve Jobs was still alive, he would not have allowed that charging port on the bottom. And I'm sure sir Jony didn't want a port on the front of the device because it looked ugly to him.

[Muirium]

I guarantee you, if the Magic Mouse 2 was developed while Steve Jobs was still alive, he would not have allowed that charging port on the bottom. And I'm sure sir Jony didn't want a port on the front of the device because it looked ugly to him.

Yep. I doubt Sir Ive even lifted a finger in the "design effort" which left millions lifting their mice just to charge them. He was so checked out of Apple by that point he was just an obstacle to any forward progress until, at last, he quit. Checks timeline: the Magic Mouse 2 came out in 2015, right in the design drought before he left and others could ship.

Here's my mouse, for what it's worth. A Magic Mouse with added magic:

Magic Mouse Mobee 1.jpg (86.68 KiB) Viewed 23296 times

Mine charges wirelessly, and has been for most of the years I've had it, since 2010 as memory serves. How?

Magic Mouse Mobee 2.jpg (100.91 KiB) Viewed 23296 times

A long forgotten aftermarket upgrade: the Mobee Magic Charger. You pop out the AA batteries the original Magic Mouse required, and slide in this inductive-charging battery pack. Be sure to leave your mouse sitting on the USB powered charger when you're away, and its battery life will be eerily eternal. It's also quite a lot lighter than even just one AA battery (a well known hack, back in the day), making my mouse weigh the same as the next gen model, without the harpoon belly!

There were two problems with this approach:

• The plastic clip which holds the Mobee inside the mouse eventually fatigues and cracks. I solved that problem with a pair of little spots of super glue!
• Apple killed it stone dead anyway with the wholly hack-unfriendly Magic Mouse 2.

Low profile—let alone multi-touch scrolling!—mice aren't for everyone, I certainly get that. But mine suits me and is well into its second decade without any harm to its feel or finish. This one even works (as a simple 2 button mouse) with my now 20 year old 12" PowerBook; unlike its successor, oddly enough. I believe the Aluminium PowerBooks are the very first Macs with built-in Bluetooth.

If and when it breaks, I'd likely replace it with a Magic Trackpad, but there's still no sign of that as yet. Besides, Mobee sent me a second battery pack when my first one fatigued (it's obviously a well known problem) so I've options!

[apastuszak]

I own the original Magic Mouse and recently I bought a Magic Mouse 2. I got them both used for $20.00 each. I didn't want the Magic Mouse 2 originally, because I didn't like the idea of charging it on it's side. The Magic Mouse just took batteries I could swap out.

The MM sat too low for me and the MouseBase only worked with the MM 2. The Mouse Base definitely made the MM 2 more comfortable for me. And people seem to like it, because it constantly sells out. But I'm firmly entrenched in the world of trackballs now. I followed Kensington's advice and forced myself to use a trackball for 30 days. Now I'm kinda hooked.

[Muirium]

All the way back in 1997, I got my first laptop. An Acer Extensa 355, I think, it was a total piece of shit, as it turned out! Immediately, I loathed the trackpad, which was beyond farcically small, even by the standards of the day. So I bought a clip on Logitech trackball.

If I’m remembering right, I used that trackball as my main pointing device for about 2 years. By then I really had to give up on that laptop!

So yeah, I've done my time in the trackball mines. It was okay. I liked the precision versus a trackpad (especially a really shitty trackpad like the one I had) and I found it pretty quick. What I didn't like was the thumb movement itself, which would eventually make my thumb and hand sore if I really used it for hours on end. Back then, I used "the mouse" more for editing text so the work I was doing on that laptop really did have me scrolling and dragging around a lot on the trackball. Yes, it was just a small one, and maybe Not All Trackballs… etc. But FWIW it wasn't a great fit for me. I got my (overly huge) Intelimouse Explorer in 1999 and I've never bought or even seriously used a trackball since.

Lucky for me, low profile "pinch mice" got a lot better since then, and the Magic Mouse's touch scrolling makes it a real keeper for me.

[apastuszak]

I have never been a fan of the trackpad. I've been using ThinkPads for work since thew 90s. And I've always plugged in an external mouse. But for some reason, I like Apple's implementation of the trackpad. I don't know why. But it seems to work for me. I would still rather use an external pointing device. But using the Apple trackpad doesn't suck.

I was debating getting a Magic Trackpad at one point to try it out. But my setup involves a USB switch box and two different computers. The USB switch box moves my mouse, keyboard and Yubikey between two different computers. I was debating just buying a Bluetooth USB dongle, but it seems WIndows can only support ONE Bluetooth transmitter at a time and I don't have rights to disable the internal Bluetooth transmitter on my work laptop.

[digital_matthew]

Ducky Secret was PBT. Apparently some version is still available.

As a Secret owner I can confirm. It's a good, solid mouse, though the buttons are developing quite a shine, and the insulation on the cord has split.