If the title didn’t cause you to spit up your morning/afternoon drink of preference, perhaps this will: the mouse is specially designed to reduce noise pollution by 22.5 dB so that the precious ears of your fellow office workers or the kids running about your house won’t be disturbed. Protect your eardrums from the menace to society (the mouse, of course) for only $30 US.
Wow, I had no idea mouse clicks were so annoying.
I bought a wonderful TactilePRO keyboard… my wife made me stop using it because of the key clicks.
It’s a great keyboard.
solving the problems we didn’t know we had!
now if only they could do something about those pesky co-workers…
Are they even serious ? I can understand they can claim their mouse is quiet but saying that other mouses (or mice) create noise pollution is going overboard in my opinion. What’s next? The quiet monitor ?
Well, they have a point. If you’re in an office with god know how many mice all clicking away, including keyboards… I can see how that would get annoying.
Only if you’re paying attention to it, but that way everything can become irritating.
Although I understand your point, I believe you are assuming the only noise in the office would be the clicking of the mice and keyboards. There is usually much more noise than just that. I can think of office chatter and printers as examples. Oh, and what about the case of a Call Center ? I don’t think the mouse would be such a pollutant in that environment.
I used to work in a “cubicle jungle”. You don’t hear mouse clicks; too much ambient noise.
Actually there are quite a few posts on silent computing forums from people looking for quiet monitors. For about the last 10 years the monitor has been the loudest component in the systems I’ve built.
It’s also the most difficult component for the user to silence. You can build a fanless PC, pack it with noise damping foam, use SSDs instead of HDDs, and put the file server in another room, but the monitor has to stay uncovered on the desk.
Finding a quiet monitor can be quite a challenge, especially if you’re looking for a larger display. I haven’t found a genuinely silent 26″+ screen yet.
Of course quiet computing is a niche market, but it is a unique selling point for the people who do care about it.
Quiet computing people remind me of the rich aristocracy who were so rich that they started to believe they had ailments they never really had. Its akin to the audiophile wonks out there who spend $7250 for Pear Anjou speaker cables and maintaining there is a noticeable difference – ignoring the fact that blind tests show that they couldn’t identify it from a generic cable.
I’ve been around these ‘quiet PC’ philes and I swear they make up things claiming that there are sounds when there are most certainly are not – its almost as though they have an addiction to purchasing any old thing and creating up a laundry list of issues, that don’t exist, simply to justify their addiction to spending.
The difference is that there’s clear room for improvement in the noise pumped out by most computers. Only someone who’s deaf, or in a very noisy environment, would fail a blind test between a typical PC and a computer that’s built for quietness.
Another contrast with audiophile tweaks is that most low noise computer components are very reasonably priced. The difference in price between a low noise fan and a generic fan is only $5-$10, yet the difference in noise is dramatic. Even swapping out a HDD for a stack of SSDs is a bargain compared with most audiophile products.
That may be true of some obsessives, but then there are some performance PC enthusiasts who endlessly tweak and upgrade their systems to get a few more points on a benchmark, or a few more FPS in the latest games. Most people, even if they care about performance, or gaming, or computer noise, aren’t that fanatical about it.
In my experience most quiet PC fans are pretty content with their computer once it’s inaudible, or at least acceptably unobtrusive. I built a low noise media centre over a year ago, the total cost around $1500 (a pittance compared with an audiophile approved CD transport), and as I can’t hear it, and it does the job, I haven’t felt any need to touch it since then.
Even a non-audiophile music fan might be unhappy with a HiFi that suffers from clearly audible background noise, why is it so strange that PC users might not want that either, especially when using a PC for music and video?
I don’t get it. Keyboards are FAR noisier than mice.
I have a mechanical switch keyboard just to irritate coworkers and my trackball has a distict ‘click’ to the buttons.
But in all reality, you would need to work in a very (VERY) quiet office to warrant any kind of complaint from mouse clicks. That would also assume that absolutely no one is typing, talking, coughing, scratching their ass etc.
Thanks, but no thanks.
I’ll keep my good old DeathAdder. I’ll cause less pollution to the planet by not buying a new mouse actually because the cost of fabric will overcome any clickies pollution that I make.
This reminds me when I got in high school. Our computer lad was composed of 486 and Pentium 133 and they all had mechanical keyboard. God damn that was loud when everybody typed. We had typing classes and at the end of the year everybody typing speed was realy improve and as many typed faster, it got louder. This reminds me movies where they show military typists in a room transmitting order!
Because I think that must be live mice (the small, furry rodents wit a cheese obsession*), sqealing at the top of its lungs while clinging on to life as it is pawed by a cat.
*: Or, depending on your world view, the representation in our universe of highly intelligent pan-dimensional beings, performing experiments on us