Cult of Mac has an article rumoring that Apple’s Magic Mouse has been slated for the scrap heap. Mind you, they later updated the article to say that the mouse received a new part number. Still, if the rumor of the Magic Mouse demise were true, I would really have to wonder what was running through Apple’s mind there.
There are a lot of issues with a computer that only has a trackpad for a pointing device. Think of gaming here. There are hundreds of games available for the Mac that rely on a Keyboard/Mouse combo. Portal and Portal 2 and all other “First Person Shooters” are reliant on a mouse as part of the Keyboard/Mouse combo. Trying to play an FPS with a trackpad would be brutal if it’s even possible.
I think Cult of Mac should have though that report out a bit more and wrote the article to state that “There is a rumor floating around that Apple is removing the Magic Mouse for sale, but this can’t possibly be true considering the need for mice with computers.” Maybe they just wanted that sensational headline that all blogs seem to want.
Other blogs have picked up the story and ran with it before doing any kind of research or common sense thinking for that matter. (Those links were just from the first 10 Google search results!) Only, one of those linked sites actually thought out the story and wrote about it as I am. However, they still wrote their headline to make out that Apple was removing the mouse. The rest wrote the story like the mouse was being removed, then at the end of the story decided to say either that it was unlikely or that Cult of Mac updated their story. One didn’t even bother to do that. There are probably a bunch more that did pretty much the same as the other blogs I linked to.
This is becoming a standard in the blogging world, and sometimes in the mainstream media. It’s not unheard of to hear a story on television that was picked up on a blog that was totally wrong, and the news show had to later correct the story. I believe a story of Steve Jobs death was picked up by a mainstream media source.
News is a very profitable business. Blogs make money be getting eyeballs on their site so that all those annoying Flash based and HTML5 based ads can be seen by those eyeballs. There are plenty of blogs that post 20-50 articles a day just so that one or two might get seen by someone who would otherwise not have bothered to go to their site.
Sadly, this kind of sensational writing will never change. So I suppose we should get used to it. Even our favorite blogs that we feel would never do such things, if they put ads on their site, trust me, they will.
Dave M.
