Meek Geek

Comfort Zones, Not Healthy

Razer Pro|Click 1.6 Review

My friends own the black ones and recommend them, so I decided to drop the cash for one of these. Initially I was looking at the 3-button Krait, but the 7-button Pro|Click 1.6 had the same specs and was just $5 more, and came with Mac drivers, so why not?

The Hardware

The mouse is everything that Razer mice are: Sensitive and precise.

Razer mice are not for heavy-handed people. They are designed differently from their competitors, so you will need to try them out and let things sit in for a while before they get comfortable. Your motor skills will improve after this mouse. That’s for sure.

• Instead of resting your hand on it and pushing, you need to rest the bottom part of your palm near your wrists on the desk, hold the mouse with the fingertips and move. This technique seems to provide finer control.

• The mouse is very sensitive. It takes a little flick to move the cursor across a 24” screen. This is not a bad thing because little movements are also registered accurately, so you can control the cursor very precisely.

• The mouse has a very long profile and the bottom is sharply angled, so users with smaller hands might need some getting used to

• If you don’t like to rest your entire palm on the mouse, the large-ness of a Razer mouse would get in the way

• The left and right buttons are a mixed bag

  • The buttons are enlarged, which provides a larger click area, while also making it easy to accidentally click them
  • The box touts the non-slip coating on top of the plastic buttons, but expectedly, they wear off after some time, leaving bits of gunk on your fingers
  • Due to this sensitive design, Razer mice are known to develop a mechanical problem where clicking actually registers as a double click
  • I have encountered this double click issue right out of the box (5 times in 20 hours of use) which is completely unacceptable

• The four side buttons are passable

  • There are two on each side, in a rocker design. I prefer individual buttons.
  • The feel of the button clicks are kinda mushy and they don’t have much travel in them. Not good.
  • Their positions make them easy to press accidentally if you’re not holding the mouse in the precise way that Razer intended. Kinda unforgiving.

• The scroll wheel is tight compared to other brands of mice out there

  • This might be due to Razer’s goal of supporting games, where moving the wheel notch-by-notch is important, for instance, when switching weapons in FPS (first-person shooter) games

The Software

Sadly, Razer’s Mac support is utter crap. I uninstalled the drivers as soon as I installed them.

Here are some problems I observed on the latest 1.6.7 drivers:

• The mouse button numbers are labeled incorrectly in the drivers. Atrocious.

• The mouse drivers interact horribly with the native mouse settings in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse - The driver settings are built on top of the native settings, so setting the sensitivity to 100% in Razer’s software isn’t really 100% if your native sensitivity is only 20%

  • They reset all the native mouse settings to 0 at random times, so your mouse movement, scrolling speed and double-click speed are all set to 0 and things slow to a crawl
  • Switching between the native and Razer’s mouse setting panels is an exercise in frustration because the mouse speeds change when you switch around

• Some of the mouse settings in Razer’s panel don’t produce any noticeable effect at times

• Mouse buttons cannot be swapped, for example, to set button 3 events (originally triggered by pressing the wheel) to activate by pressing the side button

• The mouse settings reset when you disconnect and reconnect the mouse. This is a deal-killer.

• Buttons 6 and 7 do not work

  • They are curiously mapped to the scroll up and scroll down events
  • For some inexplicable reason, Razer’s control panel can’t change their behavior
  • Assigning button 6 and 7 to a native command, for example opening the Dashboard, doesn’t work even when Razer’s Mac drivers are uninstalled

• The uninstallation scripts for the Mac drivers are arcanely hidden within the .pkg installer. I had to “Show Package Contents” just to find them, and then start Terminal.app to execute the script. Even then, the mouse drivers were still in effect until you rebooted.

Razer’s Non-Support

Much has been said online about Razer’s technical “support”. Now, I’ve experienced it for myself.

Submitting a ticket and getting a response took an entire day, and subsequent responses also took about a day. That would be fine if they were able to resolve my problem. Instead I was put through a hundred kinds of dumb:

• Asking me for my OS version when I have already mentioned it previously
• Making me repeat my problem over and over again because they don’t read past emails when responding
• Telling me to install the drivers for buttons 6 & 7 to work, when I’ve mentioned that it doesn’t work with or without the drivers
• Unwilling to confirm the problems I’ve encountered, even after I’ve given them dummy step-by-step instructions

It seems Razer is intent on staffing their support department with folks who read the latest email from a customer, and replies whatever they wish, without referring back to original correspondence. They should assigning the case to the same staff so that there is continuity.

Basically it has been an endless cycle of ass-covering. I give them a list of problems I’m encountering and steps to reproduce them, they respond by poking at each thing one-by-one, asking an irrelevant question in each response, without giving me an solution or acknowledging any problems.

Closing Thoughts

The positive reviews you see for this mouse are most likely from people who didn’t play with the drivers in-depth, or are using it in Windows. A quick search on the internet shows that problems with the drivers have existed since middle of 2007.

I took a gamble by buying this, hoping that the new drivers released since then fixed the problems, but apparently Razer doesn’t have the correct engineers doing their Mac drivers, nor the intention to fix this shortcoming.

The only way to make this mouse usable is to lose all the nice features touted by Razer marketing, like on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment, and rely on the native mouse drivers that come with Mac OS X. I’m ok with that, but then the two buttons on the right can’t be assigned.

Sigh.