The Mighty Mouse.
[PHOTO: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

Here it comes to save the day. The Mighty Mouse is on its way—out. That’s the word from AppleInsider, which says it has learned that Apple is planning an upgrade of its plain white mouse. The new version will supposedly feature touch-sensitive controls and do away with the current model’s often nonfunctioning scroll ball.

I use a Mac at work and I’ve found the Mighty Mouse, on the whole, to be a clever little device. With it, I visually sift through the many windows on my desktop, call up my indispensable widgets (like Dictionary.com’s dictionary and thesaurus), and right-click without having to hold down “Control” as you did with old Apple mice.

On the other hand, the scroll ball has always been a groan-inducing issue, with bits of gunk and natural hand oil mucking up the mechanism and rendering it useless. Too often I’m forced to use a pencil eraser or alcohol swab to clean out the debris from under the mouse’s impregnable plastic casing.

(As I am typing this, the trackball refuses to scroll up. Yes, my hands are clean.)

When it does work, the 360-degree scrolling is an inspired feature that I miss when using the Logitech mouse on my home PC. Touch controls on the new, improved version would ostensibly preserve that attribute.

Apple Insider believes the company might move from a white plastic casing to an aluminum finish to complement the silver sheen on Apple’s newest computers. Also good news. Having a white mouse on a desk cluttered with inky newspapers, graphite pencils, and, for some of us, nacho-cheese Doritos is like laying down white carpet in a hunting lodge. —Nick K. Mandle