Apple’s New Software Offering Requires Non-Apple Mouse — One With Three Buttons

Apple announced Shake 2.5 yesterday, and buried in the technical specs is a little tidbit that we found both ironic and interesting, a three button mouse. The irony comes from the fact that Apple doesn’t offer a three-button mouse, despite cries from its customer base for such an Apple branded device.


From the company’s technical specs page on Shake 2.5:



Macintosh system requirements





  • 800MHz Power PC G4 processor
  • Mac OS X v10.2 or later
  • QuickTime 5.0.4 or later
  • 256MB of RAM
  • 1GB disk space for caching and temporary files
  • Graphics card with 32MB of video memory and OpenGL hardware acceleration, such as the NVIDIA GeForce2 MX or GeForce4 MX or the ATI Radeon 7500
  • Display with 1280-by-1024-pixel resolution and 24-bit color
  • Three-button mouse


You can find more information on Shake at Apple’s Web site, including the Technical Specs.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Shake is a recent acquisition for Apple, and the way the product works — with multiple buttons — is a legacy issue. We simply find it ironic that the real world, where more than 95% of computer users use mice with two or more buttons, is clashing with Apple’s world, where you shouldn’t *need* more than two buttons, in the form of an Apple-branded application. The world is a funny place like that sometimes.

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