The Apple USB Mouse (model number M4848), commonly called the "Hockey Puck" because of its unusually circular shape, is a

mouse A mouse (: mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus'' ...

released by Apple Computer, Inc. It was first released with the Bondi Blue

iMac G3 The iMac G3, originally released as the iMac, is a series of Macintosh personal computers that Apple Computer sold from 1998 to 2003. The iMac was Apple's first major product release under CEO Steve Jobs following his return to the financiall ...

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 Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

connection format and not the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB). Many reviewers criticized the mouse for its design; in 2008, Bryan Gardiner of ''

Wired Wired may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976 * ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993 * ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017 * "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street'' * "Wired ...

'' deemed the mouse to be among "Apple's most notorious flops".

Design and criticism

Unlike the Mouse II that preceded it, the "hockey puck" mouse has a circular shape; it has a single mouse button located at the top, like previous Apple mice. The mouse's round shape is widely considered clumsy, due to its small size and tendency to rotate in use. A slightly improved later version had an indentation on its button showing where to press. This was a major cause for the success of the Griffin iMate ADB to USB adapters, as they allowed the older, more comfortable ADB Mouse II to be used with those iMacs. There were some products like the ', a shell that attached to the USB mouse to give it the ADB mouse's elliptical shape. 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.

Design and criticism

Legacy

Available colors

References