[ken]

I lived through this transition and I truly don’t recall any of the issues with ball mice. They always worked fine for me.

You had to clean out the ball every now and then, but I have to clean off my optical sensor fairly regularly, too.

[jjeaff]

I remember having to clean out the ball thing every few days. And if you waited too long, I needed tweezers to scrape the lint loose. I don't recall ever actually needing to clean the optical sensor on an optical mouse.

[pushpop]

You shouldn’t need to do it every few days unless your surfaces were particularly grimy. And on those kind of surfaces the slip pads would still need cleaning even on optical mice plus the sensors on the early ones didn’t work too great unless you had clean smooth surfaces anyway. So like for like, ball mice should last 6 months before needing a clean.

[pushpop]

Likewise. I used to be an avid gamer back then and optical mice were terrible for a long time. They were either too light, or batteries needed changing too often (in the case of wireless mice) or they just didn’t work properly on your surface. For a long time I preferred traditional mouse balls over optical mice.

As an aside, anyone else noticed how much better wireless mice were then than they are now? The range on those things used to be so far that I could control my desktop PC from the garden. Now I can’t even have the mouse two meters away from the USB dongle.

[jjeaff]

That might be due to much more interference in that frequency range from all the many devices you have now vs then.

[pushpop]

While there is more supported devices using that spectrum I don’t personally have that many of them running at any point in time so I’m not convinced that’s the main cause of the problem. I suspect it’s more due to wireless keyboard / mice being lower powered than they used to be so they can support longer battery life and lower profile USB dongles.