Exactly Like Balls

I have an Apple optical mouse, no moving parts. The bottom works like a normal mouse (back when they had balls) and the top works like a mini-trackpad.

I've had no problems with it except carpal tunnel, when doing hundreds and hundreds of repetitive movements on it it.

Except.

Except it occasionally acts exactly like a balled mouse with cat hair in the rollers -- it rolls one direction but not the other, or its movements become terribly nonlinear where you have to scroll three times as far to get the same cursor movement.

Each time it happens, I turn it off, wait a minute, then turn it back on and let the computer find it again. My inclination is to turn it over and clean the bottom of the mouse, but there are no moving parts there. Nothing to clean.

Do you suppose Apple built-in this behavior so people would feel comfortable with this mouse, the same way early electric cars had to have "revving up" noises play through a speaker?

Turn it over and clean it. It only takes a bit of grime to screw it up.
I use an optical mouse and about once a year I need to give it a little cleaning (and about every other year, I need to give it a little buy-a-new-one).

Clean what?

The bottom of the mouse.

Why.

_Howard wrote:

It only takes a bit of grime to screw it up.

Where, on the optical lens? You'll have to explain why that would cause elongated motion or one-directional travel only.

Instead of spending eight seconds of your time cleaning it on the off chance there may be a bit of grime, buy a new one. That makes more sense than wasting so much of your time.

So, you can't explain it either.

All I can tell you is that I have had an optical mouse display similar problems and all it took to fix it was to clean the bottom of the mouse.

That's a nice story but I'm not buying it.

"Not buying it"?
Why?
You think they just make up this stuff?

Lifewire wrote:

The second reason your Magic Mouse may be skipping or hesitating is that debris, dirt, dust, and gunk have become lodged in the mouse's optical sensor.

See those vertical black strips running the length of the underside? Those hold the bottom of the mouse 1/32" off the desk surface. The optical sensor is another 1/8" above the bottom of the mouse.

There has never been -- nor could there ever be, unless you're using the mouse in a vat of pig fat -- any way "debris, dust and gunk" could get all the way up into the optical sensor.

Not that that could or would -- in any way -- explain the behavior anyway. It's not a failure to detect motion as an obstructed sensor would deliver. It's a slow-motion movement detection, where moving the mouse a foot moves the cursor an inch, or a uni-directional blockage where the cursor will move down the page but not up. These are characteristic symptoms of dirty mouseball sensors, one of which measures travel and one direction. I have pulled cathair off the internal rollers, and the restrictions make perfect sense in a balled mouse.

In a ball-less optical mouse, it has to be a software subroutine to MIMIC a balled mouse.

The air is full of dust, pollen, water vapor, mite eggs, etc. You needn't roll the mouse over a half-eaten Snickers bar or milkshake drool for the sensor to pick up a bit of gunk over time. It's a very low power light source and the elements in the photodiode array (I'm guessing here) that captures and reports the movement are very small. You don't need a booger-sized chunk to cause a problem.

Whether you believe the problem you reported was caused by gunk on the sensor or not, that is certainly the first place I would look - because it's the easiest thing you can fix.

There are only a few things that can cause the mouse to act improperly. If it's hardware, and the batteries are good, then the only thing that the user can work on is cleaning the sensor, unless you want to buy the necessary test equipment and spend the time required to troubleshoot the mouse's electronics - if you have the knowledge to do so. Even if you did, and found the problem component, you would still just buy a new mouse. If it's a communications problem, all you can do is to reinstall your bluetooth service and pray. If it's a problem in the mouse driver in the OS, you can reinstall or update that and hope your problem goes away.

The reason I suggested cleaning the mouse is because that's the easiest thing to do. One should always start with the simplest fix - especially when it only takes a few seconds. The problem could also be the surface on which the mouse is used. These things are very susceptible to problems caused by gunk.

I do not believe that Apple installed software to cause the mouse to misbehave. I'm just not going for that.

Well OF COURSE Apple didn't install software to make the mouse misbehave. That would be ludicrous!

It's obviously a virus, downloaded unintentionally from the internet, probably written by Russian hackers to make Apple mice misbehave worldwide when they're undertaking an operation and can't afford to have the hacker-trackers' computers operating at peak efficiency.