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Mighty Mouse: hardware easter egg or optical illusion?

It appears as if the Apple Mighty Mouse's LED produces the pattern of, well, a …

Flickr user Dan Bowles has a few photos up on his photostream today depicting an odd discovery he made while checking out his Apple Mighty Mouse. It appears as if when you lift the mouse and look at the light pattern formed by the red LED underneath, it forms the shape of, well, a mouse.

(photo by Dan Bowles's camera phone) 

Skeptical, I waited until I got home from work to post about it so that I could observe this phenomenon with my very own Mighty Mouse and compare it to the optical patterns of other, non-mighty Apple mice. Indeed, my own Mighty Mouse produces this oddly creepy, mouse-like pattern just like in Mr. Bowles's pictures. I tested out a regular Apple optical mouse and saw a completely different light pattern, sort of like a four-way venn diagram. I even tried them both at different angles, hoping to prove that it was merely the light angle that was showing us our red, furry friend, but alas, that experiment was a failure. The two light patterns were definitely different.

The question is: is this a real hardware easter egg, or are we all just completely drunk off of the Kool Aid that Steve's been feeding us? 

Channel Ars Technica