Apple Magic Mouse

In the not too distant past, I began to love Apple products. iPod, iPhone, Macbook Pro, iMac, Time Machine… you get the point. One thing has stayed constant, the innovative design and updates Apple bring with new technology. Of course, one other thing stayed constant, the shittyness of the Mighty Mouse – Apples “defacto” design for a mouse. It was bulbous, annoying and used an awful ball in the middle that consistently broke.

The neat, typical from Apple style packaging

Thank god Apple got sued and went off to rethink that atrocity. Now we have the “Magic Mouse”, Apple’s newest addition to their hardware family – and my god is it good.

First off, the look. It’s thin. Really thin. I’ve been using a Logitech Laser gaming mouse on my iMac now and it’s big, black and beautiful. Works a charm, very accurate and smooth to use. However, it deprives my PC of the mouse and I’m sick of hot-swapping the wireless USB dongle receiver between the two, so a new bluetooth-enabled Apple mouse it is!

It powers off two AA batteries which are, thankfully, supplied in the device upon arrival. The only other thing present on the mouse is the switch to turn it on. After a 10 second setup on my Mac’s bluetooth controller section, I was away. Of course, it was slightly rocky, as compared to my Logitech mouse, this one isn’t as quick and smooth. Enter betterTouchTool, a small preferences app that runs in the background to control the mouse – including higher-then-standard sensitivities for those of us who prefer smoother tracking.

The underbelly of the beast

The big innovation here is no buttons. Like the Mighty Mouse, this one clicks by pressing down the entire surface. Right click needs to be enabled separately, or you can just use ctrl+click. To scroll, and here’s the weird bit, you simply scroll with your finger on the surface of the mouse – which is made of the same glass materials as the trackpads on new Macbook and Macbook Pro lines.

At first this is particularly odd, but once you get used to it, as someone said on twitter earlier, it’s like an extension of your hand. You won’t know what you were doing before this came into your life. With the better touch tool hacks you can have two and three finger gestures (allowing expose to be called) involving taps, clicks and swipes… all to make life easier. It’s shocking how well it works, and surprising that Apple didn’t bother with it in the first place!

Comparison, Logitech vs. Apple

Overall my short experience with this mouse has been fantastic. I’m more then impressed with it. I ordered last Friday on the Apple online education store and received it at about 6PM this evening by courier (I guess they work late during Christmas). Anyone with an Apple computer should definitely pick this up. I would recommend it to Windows/Linux users with bluetooth devices too, but I’m not sure if there is software available for those OS’ yet.

Below is my gallery of images…