4 ms·
Not just the mice themselves. For a long time, Macs had an insane mouse pointer acceleration curve. It required long movements in order to move the pointer anyw
by atombender 7y ago
Not just the mice themselves. For a long time, Macs had an insane mouse pointer acceleration curve. It required long movements in order to move the pointer anywhere beyond the immediate area, and it affected both the trackpad and wired mice.
Back when I switched from Windows to Mac in 2006, I found this perhaps the most disruptive aspect; everything else was pretty standard GUI stuff, but the mouse behaviour was a nightmare. Windows had a different acceleration curve that felt super snappy (at the cost of a loss of precision), whereas on the Mac it was sluggish; it was a chore to get the mouse pointer to move anywhere.
For years I ran various apps that would fix the acceleration, including a tool from SteelSeries. I wasn't alone in being frustrated — forums were full of discussions about this. I'm not sure what happened or when, but I haven't needed that app in a long time. Apple must have changed the acceleration curve — I don't see any other explanation. Perhaps it came with the attempts at unifying the trackpad with iOS gestures, which require a 1:1 correspondence of your movement with what happens on the screen.
- rimliu 7y agoYou can change the acceleration in the preferences. I don't remember if it was there in 2006, but I assume so.
- ynx 7y agoIt was.
- pier25 7y agoYou can? AFAIK you can change the cursor speed (called "tracking speed") but not the acceleration curve.
- atombender 7y agoYou've always been able to change the speed, but not the acceleration.
- pier25 7y agoI switched to Mac in 2007 and that drove me crazy too. For years I used some app[1] that imitated the Windows acc. curves but even with that it never felt as good as Windows. Never had that issue with the trackpad though, only with mice. Not sure when Apple change those, or if I just got used to the Mac curves over the years. [1] http://triq.net/mac/mouse-acceleration http://triq.net/mac/mouse-acceleration