by , 10:45 AM EDT, August 3rd, 2005

A quick check of 10 Apple retail stores Wednesday showed the Mac makers new Mighty Mouse pointing device sold well its first 24 hours.

Calls by The Mac Observer to 10 Apple retail locations in states like Virginia, Ohio, Georgia, Florida and New York showed nine of the stores sold out of the new mouse. Only one store -- Apple's flagship store in the SoHo district of New York City -- had remaining stock of less than five.

"It's been selling well," a store manager in Atlanta, Georgia told TMO, Wednesday. "We came in yesterday with people calling and standing in the store waiting for us to unpack our daily shipment. I was sold out of about 40 of (the Mighty Mouse) by 1 PM."

Other stores gave similar reports, many saying they did not recieve enough stock to meet first-day demand, but that regional managers had promised all stores would be recieving an additional shipment of the new device each day for the remainder of the week.

"I sold out of about 50 by 3 PM," said a Apple store manager in Miami, Florida, who asked not to be named. "We spent the rest of the day disappointing people in person and by phone. We had to watch our demo model very closely," he said with a laugh.

What makes the tiny new device different is a scroll ball for moving vertically, horizontally and sideways and four sensors that can be programmed for various tasks, but only on Macs using OS X 10.4.

One store manager told TMO a number of interested Windows users came in to check out the Mighty Mouse, but were disappointed to hear it can't be programmed to work on their PCs.

"As soon as they heard that, the sale was off," the unidentified manager said. "They thought it was a beautiful mouse, but that doesn't make it any better if you can't program it."