So I have this issue in my house, with dog hair. It's EVERYWHERE. Lately, it's been showing up in my mouse wheels. The hairs get all wound up in the mouse wheel, and when I try to scroll down web pages, the scrolling is crazy erratic, sometimes going up, sometimes down, sometimes both in quick succession.
So I was browsing through amazon, looking for a wheel-less, scrollable mouse. This microsoft thingy was the best looking option I found. It says it works on a mac, and proclaimed to have a 4 way scroll touchbar. I read up a bunch of reviews, but couldn't find one that said whether that stuff worked on the mac or not.
At only $21, I figured I'd give it a try. Here's the results:
It's got native bluetooth, and that worked great, no usb dongle! And it comes with actual duracell batteries ... not crappy heavy duty ones.
The scroll wheel touchbar thing works. It's strange. And neat! But strange. When you glide your finger down it, it has haptic feedback that lets you feel the "wheel clicks" you'd normally feel on a wheel based mouse.
The touch pad is clickable too. There are actually 3 buttons there. Top, middle, and bottom. The middle button is mapped to mouse 3 by default. The top to "page up" and the bottom to "page down". This seems a little weird, because you might not know which of these buttons you are pressing unless you look at where your finger is on the touchpad. I'm guessing that's something you get used to.
If that's too weird, it appears you can map those buttons to anything you want via USB Overdrive. You could make all 3 of them act the same as the middle click button if you wanted.
The other big feature of the touch pad, is you can swipe left and right on it. It defaults to horizontal scroll left and right, but I don't find that useful. Those can also be reprogrammed on USB Overdrive, they show up as "pan up" and "pan down". I changed them to "back" and "forward" for navigating history of the browser. You have to be kind of careful when you do this, though, as a quick swipe left will register a 3 or 4 clicks, so you have to use a gentile finger to only get 1 click out of it.
There is a driver for it on MS's website, but their intellisoft driver doesn't seem very helpful on mac, so I don't use it. USB Overdrive lets you map all the buttons to your hearts desire anyway.
One of the windows reviews I read when this first came out said it retailed for $50, so it seems like a pretty damn good deal for $21. I've only been using it for a day, but I dig it! Definitely takes a little getting used to the touch pad part, but it shouldn't be too bad for most people.
Anyway, hope that helps someone out there that was wondering about this thing on a Mac. It's neat-o!