Apple Magic Mouse Review

The new Apple Magic Mouse announced earlier in October has started shipping. It’s a pretty, clean, smooth, button-less and seamless mouse just like the Mighty Mouse it replaces. It is even more so, because there’s not even the tiny scroll ball anymore from the Mighty Mouse. The Magic Mouse looks like just a piece of curved acrylic topped white plastic, and an aluminum bottom. It’s possible that people unfamiliar with Apple’s mice might not believe that this device actually functions as a mouse.

Despite all the usual visual expectations of things associated with buttons and scroll wheels, the new Magic Mouse left-clicks, right-clicks, and scrolls in 360 degrees. Yes, the scrolling is important because it is one of those things I liked about the Mighty Mouse, and one of those things you don’t usually find on a PC mouse. Like the predecessor it replaces, you just click on the left to get a left-click, and click on the right to get a right click. It’s not a different physical button, there are no lines to demarcate where the left is and where the right is. It’s like magic.

But what’s even more magical is the scrolling. There’s no scroll ball. You just touch the surface of the mouse with your finger and move it around to scroll in the corresponding direction. You can move your finger in circles, and the scroll goes around in circles. The whole top of the Magic Mouse has been transformed into a touchpad, so the whole surface is your scroll area. The scrolling now supports “scroll with momentum”, or some people known as kinetic scrolling. It’s like the scrolling you see in iPod Touches and iPhones.

The touchpad surface has allowed Apple to add new features. For now, there is two finger swiping, where left and right swipe gestures can be made to move backward and forward in web pages, photos, etc.

Two-finger swiping is not as easy as it sounds. Swipe left (for right handers) is easy. But swiping right is not so, at least not when you have to hold the mouse steady at the same time. If you don’t hold it steady, the whole mouse might move when you swipe right. Swiping on a trackpad is different because the trackpad being a-fixed to a much larger device doesn’t move around. Perhaps this just a matter of getting used to, or perhaps once the top of the Magic Mouse becomes oily enough… swipes would just glide along without pulling the mouse along.

There are two things missing with the Magic Mouse though. The minor one is the squeeze action of the Mighty Mouse (yes, for non Apple people, you could squeeze the old mice) is no longer available on the Magic Mouse. Not important, because it was not easy to squeeze the old mice anyway, so it wasn’t a very popular feature. A more important missing feature is the center click of the Mighty Mouse is no longer available. It is a shame, even though center click isn’t typically used in Mac OS X applications, but many people configure it for some Expose related action. Considering that the Magic Mouse can detect two finger swipes as opposed to one finger  motions, I imagine it shouldn’t be impossible to also detect two finger clicks, and have that translated to a center click in a future software update.