this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Buy it for Life
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Sadly mice aren't really a BIFL item given their frequent use and how switches have a lifespan before wearing out. You can surely get many many years out of one, though!
I've found the Logitech g502 to be my favorite overall mouse, so much so that I bought one to keep at work. The scroll wheel mode on Logi mice is lovely for precision work (clicky) or fast and smooth; a feature I missed greatly when I tried other mice. My first one started dying after 5 years but that was used for regular gaming sessions on the daily.
Don't be afraid of the extra buttons on gaming mice, either. You can always just not use them but I've found the buttons on top incredibly useful as an undo/redo pair and makes working in anything so much nicer.
That being said, the best mouse is the one you find comfortable. Build quality is kinda the same amongst most brands. If you can work with circuits, repair is easy for any mouse. Optical switches and scroll wheels are cool but will need more stringent cleaning (my Corsair M65 had issues regularly because of cat hair somehow sneaking in).
Even if they were able to last that long, I wouldn't recommend that someone try to buy it -- or any other PC component -- for life. Technology advances.
In 1984, if you had a Mac, your mouse probably interfaced via the Mac's dedicated mouse port. That became obsolete a couple models down the line, replaced by Apple Desktop Bus.
If you had a DOS PC, you probably had a (checks) RS-232 port. That was replaced by the PS/2 port.
Then both got replaced by USB.
Now, USB-A plugs are on the way out, being replaced by USB-C.
I know that at least ADB was not -- as USB is -- designed to be electrically safe to unplug and plug in while the computer was active. I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true of other ports as well.
A Mac mouse would have one button, a PC mouse probably two. There would be no scroll wheel. Mice have since acquired a scroll wheel, and that scroll wheel has become clickable (and sometimes tiltable). My current mouse has five buttons, includes a forward and back button; that's not universal but also isn't uncommon today.
They used a mechanical ball and electro-optical encoders. These could gum up with hand oil and dead skin and such and would need to be cleaned. Now most mice use a CCD to detect motion, and the current ones are a lot better then the early ones, which would occasionally "twitch" around a bit.
I don't know the polling rate back then, but until relatively recently, mice weren't polled at rates capable of keeping up with many current monitors (which have gotten into 144 Hz and higher -- I have a 165 Hz display, and there are 240 Hz monitors out). Both would have had a considerably lower polling rate than the thousand-plus Hz that current mice can typically report their position.
Resolution is also much higher.
And some people -- I'm not in this camp myself -- really want wireless mice. That wasn't available until recently, and only really standardized in the form of Bluetooth pretty recently.
Point is, even if one could get mouse switches that would last a lifetime, one probably doesn't want to do so. The technology isn't mature enough for things to be holding in place, for a mouse made even relatively-recently to be technically comparable to current mice.
I had a wireless mouse in 2004....
Well, okay, yes. I dunno, I didn't mean "buy it for life" that literally, I suppose. I want something that doesn't break easily, or is repairable.
The "two extra" buttons seem to have been mostly used for "forward/back".
I use a tiling window manager in Linux these days, so I don't drag windows, but back when I was using a non-tiling window manager last, I set up one mouse button to be "drag window" in my window manager, so that one could just grab a window anywhere rather than on the title bar to move it. That was definitely convenient, and I'd bet that there's a way to accomplish that in other windowing environments as well.