Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt says that you won’t take mice away from some users until you pry them from their cold dead hands, but mouse die-hards (I’m one of them, notwithstanding that I’m a consummate laptop fan) should take caution in recalling the withering disdain and derision resolute keyboarders poures on the new-fangled pointing devices that Apple introduced to the mass market with their Lisa and the Mac a quarter-century ago. Elmer DeWitt cites the durable John Dvorak’s 1984 comment that “There is no evidence that people want to use these things.”
Elmer-DeWitt notes that with the growing popularity of laptops with their trackpads and other built-in cursor controllers, mice by the millions are gathering dust, and now that Apple has launched a new wireless peripheral that provides the last great bastion of mousers – desktop computer users – with an alternative, the emotional heat with which some of them have greeted the news takes him right back to 1984.
Case in point:
TechCrunch’s MG Siegler says: “This morning when I wrote a post about Apple s new Magic Trackpad, I knew it would be a little controversial. After all, I basically said that it was the beginning of the end of the mouse a device that everyone reading the post probably still uses for a good chunk of their computing on a daily basis. But I didn t expect what I said to be that controversial. To the point where we have to declare the comment section to be a war zone….”
