Magic Mouse: 24 hour review

Until yesterday, I had been using the standard Apple wired mouse (with scroll ball and side buttons) that shipped with my Mac Pro. That was a decent mouse, but, frankly, I got tired of trying (usually with not a lot of success) to clean the scroll ball. (As an aside, the scroll ball has a pretty terrible failure mode: almost random scrolling. Sometimes a page would scroll up as I moved the ball down.)

I had been meaning to buy a Magic Mouse for a month or more. (In fact, I tried to buy one twice, most recently this week, but as usual, Next Byte has nothing useful in stock. Ever.) Yesterday, I picked one up at the Mac Centre at Norwood. So after 24 hours:

  1. Installing it was easy, though not as easy as I had expected. Initially, I unplugged my wired mouse, turned the wireless mouse on, and waited, figuring some magic would happen. It didn't. In the end, I had to plug the wired mouse back in so I could launch System Preferences, and select the Mouse preference pane. It all came online pretty quickly after that.

  2. As written everywhere, it's a pretty nice design. It sure looks good. Apple seems to be almost synonymous with outstanding industrial design these days, but only just over 10 years ago, they were shipping pretty much the most woeful mice ever made.

  3. The Magic Mouse is a good weight. I always felt my wired mouse was a bit light, and had a tendency to slip all over the place. I got used to it, but I really like the extra weight in the Magic Mouse.

  4. Touch sensitive scrolling works well. It's different to a scroll ball, but that's hardly surprising. I'll get used to it.

  5. I really miss the side buttons on the wired mouse. I had them hooked up to expose the Desktop, and now I'm fumbling around with F11 again.


Summary: very cool mouse.

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