Mice Down Under

As I mentioned previously, I forgot to bring a mouse with me on my travels this trip. This is a relatively minor inconvenience with a MacBook, as it has a large and very nice built in trackpad with two-fingered scrolling and right-clicking, but sometimes you just want a mouse. It's a better pointing tool than the finger on the trackpad is.

So I went out into the city centre of Brisbane today to pick up a cheap mouse. You know, a generic USB mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel, which you can pick up for HKD50 (or maybe HKD 70 for a nice one), but which has an odd Chinese brand name. Not a Logitech (have one at home), Microsoft (have one at home for gaming) or Apple (don't like the mighty mouse).

Could I find one? Nope. Not even in BigW (think WalMart) was there a simple USB mouse for less than AUD 20 (about HKD140 now!), and the prices of the brand-name items was shocking.

The Apple Mighty-Mouse was AUD 99, which is about USD 90. It retails in the US for UDS 69!

I realise that the currently strong AU dollar is bringing prices up, but there just doesn't seem to be the range of cheaper tech stuff available at all!