I hear what you're saying.
I just bought my first mac a few weeks ago and have been frustrated by the mouse performance from day one.
I'm using an old Logitech mouse. It's a notebook model (M-UV94) where the cord can be wrapped around the body in a groove storing it quite neatly. It still works great. I really like it and it's not sold anymore, so I even repaired part of it with super glue a few weeks ago, and it's working just like new again, that is, when I use it on my IBM Thinkpad.
I finally transferred all of my files over from the old machine and have started using the Macbook full time now. So I got to looking closer at the mouse settings to see if something could be done about the performance. Actually I was thinking it might be a compatibility issue with the Mac hardware and was almost resigned to laying it to rest and buying a new one. But after poking around on the web and downloading the Logitech software for Mac, I realized that the poor performace is being caused, not by the mouse, but by the acceleration OS X applies to the mouse control!
The result of this accelleration gives the mouse a much less accurate feel to it. The effect is particularly noticable with the scroll wheel, almost to the point of rendering it useless.
On a PC there is no accelleration applied, so the movement of the cursor on the screen is directly proportional to the movement of the mouse. In other words the cursor moves the same distance on the screen no matter how fast the mouse if moved (likewise with the scroll wheel the screen scrolls the same amount for each click of the wheel, no matter how fast it's turned). So, the way I see it, your brain becomes trained to this consistent, proportional movement between the cursor and mouse, with your hand to cursor position remaining consistent. So your hand/eye coordination becomes finely calibrated such that you can make very rapid and precise movements,
However, on the Mac, by introducing accelleration the proportional movement between the cursor and mouse motion is gone. The movement of the mouse becomes unpredictable because it is too difficult to control the rate of accelleration with precision. Also your hand to cursor position on the screen starts to drift because the accelleration is not always the same for movements back and forth across the screen. The result is that your brain cannot predict the movements of the cursor. Maybe you can get use to the accelleration somewhat, but I would say that nobody will be as accurate and comfortable using accelleration applied to a mouse as without it.
Even if I am wrong about this, and there are actually people out there that prefer accelleration, there are obviously a lot of people - all PC uses for example - who are not accustomed to this. Also, I understand it was only introduced a couple years ago on OS X. So would it not make sense to give the user the ability to disable the accelleration??? (As it is now, this isn't possible. Even using the Logitech software.) Especially with such a key user interface device as the mouse. Why in god's name did they start _ing with the mouse controls like this???
Come on Apple. Pull an engineer off the iPhone team to fix this problem. One engineer is probably all that's needed.
Dare I say, Steve Jobs is rolling over in his grave.
I thought I was done with posting rants like this after decades of frustration with Microsoft ...
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