Apple USB Mouse

The Apple USB Mouse, commonly called "Hockey puck"^[1] (so called because of its unusual round shape), is a mouse released by Apple Inc. It was included with the iMac G3 in 1998 and included with all successive desktop Macs for the next two years. It was the first commercially released Apple mouse to use the USB connection format and not the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB). It is widely considered one of Apple's worst mistakes.^[1]

Design and criticism

Unlike the Mouse II that preceded it, the "hockey puck" mouse used a circular shape; it has a single mouse button located at the top. The mouse's round shape, although stylish, is widely considered clumsy, due to its small size and tendency to rotate in use. This was a major cause for the success of the Griffin iMate ADB to USB adapters, as they allowed for the use of the older, more comfortable ADB Mouse II to be used with those iMacs. Later revisions included a shallow indentation on the front of the button, but this was not enough to prevent a flood of third-party products like the iCatch, a shell that attached to the USB mouse to give it the ADB mouse's elliptical shape.^[2]

Another flaw introduced in the Apple USB Mouse, shared across all of Apple's USB offerings, is the atypically short cord. Though intended for use through the integrated hub in Apple's keyboards, Apple's transition to USB coincided with the relocation of ports on their notebooks from the center to the left edge.

Legacy

In 2000, the Apple USB Mouse was replaced with the Apple Pro Mouse.

Available colors

Graphite USB mouse

References