At some point in your life, you will be tempted to purchase a product with a pricetag that you’re pretty sure is less than what the product should be worth. In this case you should sit down, think carefully, perhaps indulge in a beverage of your choice, but ponder nonetheless the decision you are about to make. Dear Reader, I will give you a morbid example from my own experience to give life to this piece of advice. Consider:

This is the S+arck mouse from Microsoft. When this product first entered my brain several months ago, it struck me as very cool. The glowing strip in the middle… the buttonless design (a là Apple’s mouse)… it just looks neat. I didn’t give any more thought to it, though, because I automatically assumed it would be priced at something unreasonable like eighty dollars. I was at CompUSA the other day, looking for ways to spend money I didn’t have, when I ran across it again. It was sixteen dollars including tax. This is the part where alarms should have gone off in my head, or even outside of it, large klaxons with the blaring noise and flashing red lights. I should have walked away. A quality product like this should not be retailing for sixteen dollars unless they’re on some kind of firesale. With the design by some guy (I don’t know who he is, but he spells his name s+arck? Yeah, he’s probably the curator of some new age London museum that makes a billion pounds a day), the cool glowing blue strip… I mean, it came in a hard plastic case, not the standard cardboard thing. Plus it’s optical. I’ve used those $20 Microsoft mice before, for quite some time, and I’ve noticed that they kind of suck. This one was five bucks less and was much cooler.

You know where I’m going with this. It’s a piece of junk. If I move the mouse too quickly, it loses itself and jumps all over the screen. If I’m just using it and I twist it wrong, it jumps all over the screen. It has button lag. Sometimes it thinks it’s moving even if it’s not. It’s really pretty comfortable, and I took it apart and there are five LEDs inside, including one on the side far away from the glowing strip, which I couldn’t determine the purpose of. Those LEDs really serve to make it bright and cool looking, which is good because it could be lame if they didn’t light it up right, but they did. Apparently they spent so much money on those blue LEDs that they couldn’t put in an accurate optical tracking mechanism. (Side: The optical LED is still red. Do optical mice work better with red light? I am assuming so. It really makes for a cool contrast if you pick up the mouse so you can see both colors)

My brother has a saying that goes like, “Yeah, we didn’t spend enough money on that”, meaning that the object was purchased with full knowledge that it would suck, because the pricetag should have been higher. This mouse is a perfect case of that, and although the quantity of money it set me back was negligible in the long run, I can easily see purchases where this might not be the case. I feel it is my duty, as Apple Campus Rep, to say something about Apple being better than the competition because it’s built of higher-quality materials, better design, and so forth. It’s the same for anything, though, really. If someone was selling a brand-new plasma TV for $900, would you buy it? You shouldn’t, because the likelihood of it sucking, even though it technically is a plasma TV, is very high. I guess the moral of the story is: don’t just buy whatever’s cheapest. Buy the quality product. And brush your teeth, because you know that grody sensation you get if you don’t? It only gets worse the longer you wait.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.