I love my iMac. I’ve written about that in the past. I still love my iMac. However, something just didn’t feel right about the mouse. At first I thought it was just getting used to a new computer so I gave it some time. (Of course I use Linux and didn’t have the problem.) Then I thought it might just be the wireless Mighty Mouse’s weight or drag across the desk. So I put the mouse pad back which didn’t make a difference. I also removed one of the batteries to make it lighter. None of this helped. Then I thought it might just be the Apple Mighty Mouse itself. I replaced it with another mouse I had at home, then with another. No luck. My arm and my wrist began to hurt. I felt like I had a depth perception problem or I was just crazy.
After about two months I finally just looked on Google. I searched on something vague, like the mouse didn’t feel right or something like that. Lo and behold the answer to my question was there; it was the mouse acceleration curve.
Turns out, somewhere along the line between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.5 Apple decided to quietly change the acceleration curve on the Mac. The result is an acceleration cliff; the mouse moves quickly and then, right before the target it slows down…to a crawl. Normally the mouse would slow down incrementally, gradually, allowing the person to place the pointer directly on the target. Once the mouse slows down it creeps across the screen. This was causing me to overcompensate and making my arm ache after a while. Continue reading
I finally pulled the trigger; I’m now a Mac user. About a year ago Traci’s laptop’s video card mysteriously died so we bought her a replacement desktop computer. We were tight on cash so we bought a low-end Dell running Vista. I’ve lamented since then on my frustrations and disappointments with Vista and Traci absolutely despised it. It was then I began to think once again seriously of moving to Linux and avoiding an upgrade to Vista, but I found that Linux still just wasn’t quite there on the desktop yet. It was closer than it had been in the past but still not what I needed.
So, why a Mac? Well, I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about this decision and have come to a few conclusions. I need to upgrade within the next two years. My current box, although still quite snappy, will continually become slower and slower as software and operating systems (Vista, in particular) become more processor and memory intensive.
For the past 8 years I’ve been toying with the notion of switching from Windows to either Linux or Apple. I consistently dismissed the idea either because Linux wasn’t quite capable of supporting the switch or because Apples were just too damn expensive. Granted, Microsoft has made significant improvements in Windows stability (and even security) over the past several years so the impetus to switch isn’t quite what it was in the Windows 98/Me days. Windows XP was actually a pretty decent attempt at Unix by Microsoft, all things considered, but it’s still Microsoft at its base. Security sucked in XP and doesn’t seem to have improved drastically in Vista, unless you call nagging the end user to death security.