Cutting the Cord

Jen and I are trackball people.

We made the switch from mice like eight years ago and never turned back.

When wireless devices became cool a few years back, we were ready to believe, but they didn’t make a decent wireless trackball.

The only one out there had a wireless trackball, but a huge wired receiver. What’s the point in that.

Now they do.

The blue one on the left is the wireless version of the wired red one on the right.

No longer does it have the stupid wire receiver. Now it’s this tiny little USB thingy like all the rest.

So really? This whole post is about hand-held input devices?

Not quite.

Here’s where it gets silly.

The wireless trackballs are about $45 each. Being the lazy or lavish folks that we are, we each bought one for home and one for work. That makes four wireless trackballs altogether. That’s $180 worth of mice.

Ouch.

But wait.

There’s a whole cult of trackball believers out there and logitech just stopped making the wired version.

Literally we sold one of our used wired trackballs for the same price you could pay for a brand new one six months ago. That’s roughly $35, and we have two more to sell.

Assuming similar sales, we’re looking at $105 for three used mice with a difference of $75 being the end cost for our new wireless versions.

Not bad.

Not bad at all.

– b