Apple Magic Mouse Review: Is There Magic in Apple’s Magic Mouse?

At first glance, the Magic Mouse’s shape and size seem odd for a mouse. Most mice are bulbous, to conform to the shape of the user’s palm. The Magic Mouse instead has a surface that defines a gentle arc, and its height at mid-point is barely more than half an inch, which ensures that resting a palm on the Magic Mouse is a feat to be performed only by children or adults with very small hands.

The more natural way to use the Magic Mouse is to grip its sides between your thumb and pinkie, rest your index and middle fingers against the top edge of the mouse, and the base of your palm against the bottom edge. In doing so, your hand rests above the mouse without your palm ever touching the Multi-Touch surface. This mouse grip is actually pretty automatic, and leaves the index and middle finger ready to perform clicks and most gestures without the need to reposition your hand.

The Magic Mouse’s grip seems a bit uncomfortable at first, but in a short period of time becomes second nature. Unlike a conventional mouse, the Magic Mouse is best served by a light grip that leaves your hand and fingers ready for action.

First and foremost, the Magic Mouse must be a mouse. It must move smoothly across any surface and accurately track its movement, so that not only does the cursor on your screen move freely, but your hand can move the mouse freely, without hesitation.

The Magic Mouse glides on two plastic rails that provide just enough resistance to keep its movements smooth. The laser-tracking system didn’t miss a beat on any of the surfaces I tried, including mouse pads, magazine covers, paper, and tabletops.

Clicks and Scrolling

Mouse clicks on the Magic Mouse are similar to the Mighty Mouse (now simply called the Apple Mouse). The touch sensor determines where your fingertips are; clicks are defined as occurring on the left- or right-hand side of the mouse’s shell. The Magic Mouse also provides tactile feedback, producing the same clicks and pressure found with mice that have standard mouse buttons.

Scrolling vertically and horizontally are the simplest gestures to perform. I decided I loved the Magic Mouse the moment I scrolled through a large web page. Scrolling is easy and intuitive; a gentle swipe of a finger in either direction produces a scrolling motion in a window. One scrolling option, Momentum, allows your mouse to register the speed of your swipe. It converts this into the speed of your scroll, and allows scrolling to continue for a bit after you stop the swiping motion. This type of scrolling is great for large documents with many pages of data. Scrolling side to side is just as easy and just as satisfying.

Where Magic Mouse gestures become less than intuitive is the two-finger swipe. This gesture, usually performed with the index and middle fingers, is identical to the standard one-finger side-to-side scroll, except that you use two fingers instead of one. What makes it more difficult? First, both fingers must be in contact with the Magic Mouse’s surface when you perform the swipe. For me, at least, this means I have to modify the way I grip the mouse in order to perform this gesture. When I use the swipe, the Magic Mouse and I have a difference of opinion about what I’m trying to do. Most times the mouse will register the correct swipe motion, but it ignores me enough times, as if I haven’t done anything, to be more than a little frustrating. This is probably the result of the difficulty I have keeping both fingers in contact with the surface for a side-to-side swipe. It’s just not a natural motion to perform while maintaining a grip on the mouse. On the other hand, if I use the two-finger swipe without holding onto the Magic Mouse, it works the way it should, every time. This is fine for moving page by page through large documents or photo galleries, but it’s pretty useless for the frequently used forward and back commands in web browsers and Finder windows. That’s a pity, because I constantly use forward and back commands. While I’m happy to see the Magic Mouse swipe support these commands, the difficulty of performing a two-finger swipe while maintaining a usable grip on the mouse is a chore.

The Magic Mouse is one of the better mice Apple has ever made, but it does have some flaws, which is to be expected for the first generation of a new product. For me, the difficulty of performing the two-finger swipe was a letdown. It’s a problem that Apple could easily resolve by adding some basic gesture customization capabilities to the Magic Mouse. If I could reassign the side-to-side scroll, which I’ve never used in any mouse, to the forward and back functions, which I use constantly, I would be a happy camper. Or, if I could create a vertical two-finger swipe, which my less-than-nimble fingers can perform with ease, then the Magic Mouse would be an ideal mouse for me.

These two basic flaws are really the only flaws I noticed in daily use of the Magic Mouse. Its tracking ability was flawless on the surfaces I tested it on, and it’s a comfortable mouse to use. The single-finger gestures are easy, natural motions that making using the Magic Mouse a pleasure.

One additional point that’s worth mentioning. The Magic Mouse currently has no mouse drivers that enable gesture support under Windows. So, if you use the Magic Mouse with Boot Camp or any other virtual environment, it will revert to a standard two-button mouse.