It’s like Magic. It’s a Mouse.

Apple Magic Mouse

I’ve been using Apple’s newly designed and named Magic Mouse for around a week now and have to say that I’m actually pretty happy to have bought it and replaced my Mighty Mouse with it.

First of all, the new Magic Mouse has no more scroll-ball, what’s probably the biggest change in the whole redesign. Apple finally found a way to remove the always-broken-due-to-dirt scroll-ball by a multi-touch surface that goes across the Mouse’s whole surface. I haven’t had any problems with scrolling yet, except for my habit that lets me always search for the scroll-ball with my fingers, heh.

Besides the new multi-touch surface, the Mouse became way more flat. It really was a weird feeling to work with it in the first few hours, but I got pretty fast used to it and the only thing I’m still missing are the buttons on the Mouse’s side. I had them configured for application-based Exposé and I know that there are some “Middle-Button-Hacks” for the Magic Mouse available which could be used for such features, but still some real buttons would be more comfortable, in my opinion.

However, I really like the new Mouse, especially since it’s a bit heavier and doesn’t feel like a cheap and shaky plastic-puttogether, as the Mighty Mouse did. Regarding the Bluetooth connectivity, I can’t see any differences yet. I didn’t experience problems neither with the Mighty nor with the new Magic Mouse. As soon as I’ll have some information about the power-consumption of the new Mouse, I’ll update this post – yet, I still run the one-time-batteries Apple provides with their devices and it’s still working pretty fine, at a battery-level of 88%. If the discharge-procedure continues straight-line I’d expect the life of those average batteries to end in around three weeks – at least with my more or less heavy usage. Of course, I’ll replace them by re-chargeable batteries, since I’m not really a fan of the one-time-use.

My conclusion on the Magic Mouse is, that it’s indeed a very high priced mouse but also uses the great multi-touch technology to provide best user-experience at the lowest annoyance possible. I think that, if the actual internal hardware is qualitatively good enough, Apple finally did a good and lasting job on this Mouse. And if you’re not one of those fanboys, that really really really need to always have the latest stuff around, you might be sticking to this Mouse for a long time.

Hope this feedback helps some of you at least a bit on deciding whether to get one for yourself or not. Enjoy!