Mighty Mouse

The click ring snapped the second I opened it. One of the side buttons immediately went dead. And I couldn’t get the damn thing back together. This is what happens when you try to fix an Apple Mighty Mouse.

I’d been avoiding this for a year. The scroll ball had failed months earlier, right after I got my Mac mini. They sent a replacement, everything seemed fine. Then the same thing happened. After the second failure, I just stopped trying. Spent months basically not scrolling because every cleaning method I could find—the official Apple one, the Tesa tape trick, even considering actual surgery on it—either didn’t work or felt like it might detonate something else. You get used to it somehow. Which is absurd when you paid for a mouse that scrolls.

Today I decided to do a full system reinstall, and I thought, why not actually fix this properly. So I opened it. The whole design is so sealed, so hostile to repair, that just looking inside breaks something.

Throwing away Apple hardware feels like betrayal, even when Apple is the one who betrayed you first. I’ve been into this ecosystem for years. The Mighty Mouse looked good sitting there next to my Apple keyboard, and they belonged together. But a product that breaks when you try to maintain it, that can’t be serviced, that just gradually stops working with no recourse—that’s not thoughtful design. That’s contempt.

Next mouse will be a Logitech. I’ll trust Apple with another one when they actually make something that works. Might be a while.

I’m not the only one who got burned by this thing.