GAD’s Review of Apple’s Magic Mouse

When I first saw the announcement for Apple’s Magic Mouse, I knew right away that I simply had to have one. I mean just look at it! It’s sleek, it’s sexy, and it just oozes Appleness. The designe engineers at Apple really hit one out of the park with this baby. Having owned an Iphone for a little over a year now, I’ve grown to love the multi-touch interface. I figured this mouse would be a natural.

I was wrong.

First, the mouse is dead sexy in person. It looks every bit as cool as you think it will. The ability to right click without an obvious right-click button is pretty slick. Some people complain that there is no third or middle-click button, but that’s a non-issue for me, and as you’ll read, I found a way to make it work. The build quality is typical Apple. In other words, it’s fantastic.

The Magic Mouse is a Bluetooth mouse which is great if you have a Bluetooth enabled laptop. With built-in bluetooth, there are no goofy USB transceivers to plug in and lose or forget. Bluetooth can be a problem though. Many USB mice I’ve used have a bit of a wake-up problem. If they sit unused for a while they go to sleep to save battery life, then they stagger a bit upon awakening. I didn’t notice that at all with the Magic Mouse. That alone made it impressive.

The problems with this mouse for me are two-fold.

First, the mouse is so low to the ground that my hand does not feel comfortable resting on it. I know this is a very personal thing, but I prefer a larger mouse that fills my hand. I use a Logitech MX 1100 at home which fits my hand perfectly. It’s a great mouse, but it’s huge. I wanted a portable mouse for my Macbook Pro – something small, light and sexy. Well, sexy is optional, but in the nerd circles in which I move, sexy hardware is a status symbol. While the Apple Magic Mouse looks sexy as all get-out, in my opinion it suffers from a bad case of form over function.

Still, the Magic Mouse is so damn sexy that any Mac Nerd would gladly forgo a bit of ergonomics to have the sexy mouse on their desk. Unfortunately, the problems go deeper than ergonomics.

The second, and far more frustrating problem for me was the Magic Mouse’s acceleration and/or tracking speed.  I had the mouse for less than a minute and knew I’d need to tweak the speed settings. A quick trip to preferences and I moved the slider to the right. Not good enough. I moved it more. Still not good enough. I finally slid the tracking control all the way to the right and it still wasn’t good enough.

I did what any self-respecting nerd would do, and hit the Internet looking for people who have solved this problem before me. Turns out lots of people have complained about this very issue. I took the advice from this thread and tried a couple of solutions. First I tried MouseZoom. This is a simple little addition to preferences that does nothing but allow for super-fast mouse tracking (or acceleration – I’m still not clear on which). It helped, but I noticed that it affected all pointing devices. When I went back to use my other mouse, it was unusable with the settings required to make the Magic Mouse tolerable. Not good.

Next I tried MagicPrefs.  This is a much more robust addition to preferences and adds a great deal of functionality. MagicPrefs lets you add things like pinch-zooming. Honestly I think that should be included with the default Apple preferences. I mean anyone with an iPhone or iTouch is used to pinching, and this mouse is just made for it. Sadly after about two hours with this enabled I had to turn it off. I like to rest my first and second fingers on the mouse while using it, and that caused the pinch-zoom to kick in constantly driving me nuts. MagicPrefs let me lower the sensitivity which was cool, but then the other features were harder to initiate as well. MagicPrefs also allows you to create a third button or middle button on the MagicMouse. Why Apple doesn’t include these features out of the box is beyond me. Perhaps there is some usability issue similar to my resting finger problem that I’m unaware of.

MagicPrefs made the mouse much more usable, but the same issue existed as with MouseZoom. When you set the tracking speed high enough to make the Magic Mouse usable, other mice become useless.

I feel that I should note two important caveats to my complaints about the Magic Mouse tracking speed problem. First, the global setting does not affect the track pad on my Macbook Pro. Second, who uses more than one mouse with their laptop anyway? For the average person, given the availability of a tool like MagicPrefs, the tracking speed may be a non-issue. As a grumpy consumer though, I am bothered that I needed to hunt down and install a 3rd part application in order to make a $70 mouse work.

All my complaints aside, with MagicPrefs installed, the Magic Mouse is pretty slick. The addition of pinch zooming is very cool, and worth the hassle of finding the software, but only if you don’t lay your lazy fingers on the mouse when you use it.

After keeping the mouse for a couple of days, I decided to return it. Before I got the Magic Mouse I was using a Logitech VX Nano with my Macbook Pro. While not as sexy looking as the Apple Magic Mouse, this little beast is still pretty darn slick. It doesn’t do multi-touch, but for me, that just wasn’t a feature that I really needed. The VX Nano is a radio mouse, so requires a little USB plug to be inserted, thus taking up a USB port. The plug is so small that I leave it in all the time.  The advantage of the Nano is that it works, and it works perfectly and my fingers can rest on it all day long.

The VX Nano also came with a cute little neoprene bag to store it in when traveling. That’s a nice touch. My mouse gets thrown in my bag when I travel, and I travel a lot. The little mouse cozy keeps my Nano looking like it just came out of the box. I doubt the Apple mouse with it’s cool smooth plastic top would survive in my bag for long.

I really wanted to love the Magic Mouse. It rates an easy 10 in the looks department, but I have to say that even with the lack of the sexy sleek design and neat multi-touch capability, I just plain like the Logitech VX Nano better.