Alright. You put a lot of miles on a mouse. Over time, they get quirks, and those are actually just little stress fractures and other flaws that you beat into them, and I don't just mean the body of the mouse. The feet are ablative and wear away, the plastic used to make the buttons go click gets rickety, and the wheel gets greasy and inaccurate.

The way cheap mice get around this is by using bulkier, thicker plastic and wheel-tracking optics that scan larger, lower-resolution areas. All that makes 'em last longer, but it makes it harder to click and scroll, and fucks with the relationship between your brain saying click and the computer hearing click. It adds inconsistency.

Using cheap input devices is like using bulk Bic ballpoints. Your lettering slides around and the amount of force required to overcome the ink's tackiness is also the amount of force it takes to throw the ball across the whole word.

And that's just the buttons. A cheap mouse sticks its cheap circuitry anywhere it fits in the body, where a good mouse levels the weight of the internals across the axises you use to move it around. That means that cheap mice pull and push in directions that even if you subconsciously correct for, track the cursor in directions your brain is opposed to.

The most noticeable change when using a good mouse is the tangible effects of the USB cable. The cheap mouse cable is designed to withstand, to resist change, and they do it by using thick plastic shielding. Good, thin shielding is expensive. But there's more to it than just inflexibility; a cheap mouse cable pushes constantly towards the front of the device. But a floppy cable will get tangled underneath, so the cable has to be rigid enough to supports its own mass but not impede or deflect the mouse's movement. And that means sticking knit sleeves between the insulator and the wiring, but without adding weight.

There's all this before you even begin dealing with latency and accuracy, and they're all real costs that make these devices more expensive. Macros? On-the-fly reprogramming? More than three chunky, finger-bashed buttons? These are all good things.

But the real test for using a good mouse is to then switch to a bad mouse. Like, you're helping a friend delete all the pornspam off his machine, and you do that swirly thing you do to calibrate your brain to someone else's sensitivity and acceleration, and then it hits you: this mouse is a piece of shit. I thought I knew you, man. I thought you were cool.

So what is it? Are you a good Mont Blanc owner, caretaker, secret lover? Do you only use Mont Blanc ink because you know to use otherwise violates not just the warranty, but the honor of your implement?

Or does it not matter. A pen's a pen, a mouse is a mouse, and they both smell like spit after a week, anyway...

i have a fever and love my mouse