What’s the Deal with Wireless Keyboards and Mice, Anyhow?
Published at 21:43 on 28 January 2012
Really, what’s the point?
It’s not as if having a cable on my keyboard limits its usefulness in any way. Maybe the cable on my mouse does — a little. Most of the time, though, I’m completely unaware of it, too. It’s only a thin cable, not a ship’s anchor chain or anything.
Meanwhile, having a wired connection to the CPU means both keyboard and mouse have electric power whenever my computer does. Wireless devices must perforce depend on batteries. Batteries that can (and do) go dead. Batteries which Murphy’s Law states will go dead at the most inconvenient times imaginable. Such as late at night when you’re out of batteries an important project is due next morning. Plus the cable keeps the mouse conveniently tethered to my computer, so I can’t inadvertently take it elsewhere and lose it.
So to sum up: for keyboards and mice, Bluetooth offers little or no real advantage while imposing a very real disadvantage. I suppose there’s the odd specialized application where wires are a very real disadvantage, to the point where it’s worth putting up with the disadvantages of wireless technology for such devices. But that does nothing to explain how common wireless keyboards and mice are; it seemed that wireless mice outnumbered wired ones at Fry’s.
Which begs the question: why do so many people purchase and use such obviously inferior products? The only answer I can come up with is one of technology for technology’s sake: simply because we can use wireless keyboards and mice, many people apparently think that we should.
Though I must confess this rush to embrace a new technology for mice still strikes me as extremely odd, given how long those horrible trackball mice (perpetually getting dirty and needing cleaning) lingered on the market in the face of far superior optical mouse technology. Even the old-fashioned optical mice that required a special mouse pad still beat trackball mice (which tracked so poorly that virtually everyone bought a pad for them, anyhow) hands down. And even after the pad-free optical mice appeared on the scene, it still took nearly a decade for trackball mice to finally end up in the dustbin of history where they belong.