macOS How many mouse buttons could you possibly need...

[UberMac]

...well 65535 if Carbon is anything to go by!

Unlike earlier versions of Mac OS, which were limited to a one-button mouse, Carbon is designed to support multiple mouse buttons. (Theoretically, it can handle as many as 65,535 buttons, though the most you’re likely to encounter in practice is 3.)

http://developer.apple.com/document.../apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000989-CH203-TPXREF108

Yes, generally coding for more mouse buttons than you manufacture/sell would probably be considered foul play...!

Uber

 

[iJohnHenry]

No one should ever need more then 3 mouse buttons. - Bill Gates.

 

[Sayer]

That is an absolute limit of the data type used to tell the OS how many mouse buttons there could be.

Besides some type of haptic feedback unit could send a lot of different distinct inputs to the OS that could be treated as "buttons" but could mean almost anything to a driver/app.

People said similar things about 64-bit filesystem support in the older Finder. Now we have Macs capable of holding terabyte-plus storage internally. Not to mention SAN/NAS for use with FinalCutServer or scientific (government) computing requiring massive data stores.

Was this really worth a whole new thread?