The Magic Mouse has been updated with USB-C, and … well, that’s about it. You can ditch the Lightning cable on your desk, but that’s where the changes end.
It still has a design that’s uncomfortably thin for my hands and lacks modern niceties like Force Touch and multi-device pairing.
The Magic Mouse is, however, still the best (and maybe only) mouse that uses trackpad-style swiping and scrolling gestures in place of a traditional scroll wheel. If you can set all else aside, it’s a great experience.
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Apple Magic Mouse review
Table of contents: Apple Magic Mouse review
- Mouse + Trackpad in one
- Design
- Ergonomics
- No Force Touch nor haptics
- No multi-device pairing
- The port on the bottom
- Should you buy a Magic Mouse?
Mouse + Trackpad in one
The Apple Magic Mouse is one of the few products in the industry that blends a smooth multitouch capacitive surface (a mini trackpad) onto a mouse. No scroll wheel or scroll ball; it uses the same gestures you’re used to on your iPhone.
The surface is a perfectly smooth frictionless glass, which makes gestures feel effortless. The capacitive area extends all the way down the body of the mouse, just to the Apple logo. Flick up, down, left and right to scroll. Swipe left and right to go forward and back in Safari or Photos. Use two fingers and you can swipe between full-screen apps. Click with one finger in the corner to right-click. (Customize these gestures in System Settings > Mouse, down at the bottom.)
It’s really something unique. A few others in the PC world have tried — Microsoft’s bizarre Wedge and Arc mice, and Logitech made the T620 and T630 — but none are products that have successors still for sale. The PC world has not latched onto the concept.
That’s why it’s so disappointing when it’s not a really great mouse — if you like the idea but don’t like a few things about it, you don’t have any other options. There is no other mouse that’s similar in concept but more ergonomic for larger hands, or more premium or more cheap.
Design
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
The design reminds me of a surfboard, which perhaps exposes me as a tech blogger from Ohio who doesn’t know much about surfing. It’s totally symmetrical and not even an inch tall.
A few details about this mouse that I like: The black finish looks totally pitch black from the top down, but as you look at it from the side, it turns clear. Despite taking two levels of physics in college, I realize I actually have very little understanding of what makes the glass black. Is there something underneath that’s black? Is it stained black, like a cathedral window? How does that work? 🤷
The black color highlights the glossy mirror-like finish in a way the other colors don’t. Unlike the Magic Trackpad, which has a matte finish, it doesn’t look like a void on your desk.
The clickiness of a mouse is one of its most important qualities. You do it hundreds, if not thousands, of times in a workday. The clicky feeling of the Magic Mouse is unchanged from before; it still feels excellent. Just the right amount of force and distance with an immaculate clicking sound.
My prior experience with the Magic Mouse is from the much older battery-powered model, which had a thin removable plate on the bottom to insert batteries. By comparison, the bottom of this mouse looks much cleaner. It looks and feels more solid and singular as an object.
All of the materials feel very nice, down to the plastic feet on the bottom. Even the on-off switch is beautifully machined with a fantastic click action to it.
Pairing it with a Mac is easy; just turn it on and briefly plug it in. And you can plug it in with the nice braided (and color-matching) USB-C cable it comes with; ditch the Lightning cable from your desk.
Ergonomics
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
The 2016 – 2020 MacBook Pro was rightly derided for failing to understand its users. The MacBook Air logic of thinness and simplicity was applied at all costs to a computer that demanded power and ports.
In a similar way, the Magic Mouse is rightly derided for failing to understand its users. Specifically, their hands. It just isn’t comfortable.
Scrolling works best if you only scroll with one finger. You can keep raising your middle finger, to hover it over the surface, but that gets tiring. My middle finger tends to wrap around the edge, alongside my ring and pinky fingers. But then it gets really crowded, again because the mouse is so small.
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
Because it’s so short, my fingers are constantly rubbing against my desk, especially when I pick it up to adjust its position. You can literally fit a second Magic Mouse in the gap between my hand and the mouse.
My favorite Apple mouse of all time is the ADB Mouse II from the ’90s. Its teardrop shape slips perfectly under my wrist. It too has the philosophy that the entire mouse should be clickable — the top 40% is a button. I would really love to see a Magic Mouse take a cue here.
No Force Touch nor haptics
If you don’t mind the ergonomics, you might still be disappointed by the lack of modern features.
The Mac has had Force Touch trackpads since 2015. There’s a regular click, but you can click harder for extra functionality. You can force click on a link to preview a webpage, force click on a word to see its definition, force click on a filename in Finder to rename it and so much more.
Force Touch trackpads also have haptic feedback. Removing the physical nature of the button click enables two great features. For one, you can adjust how hard you need to click — I have mine set to the Light setting. Also, it means the trackpad can click back; when you’re dragging something on your Mac, when something snaps to a guide, you can feel a little tap.
The Magic Mouse gets neither Force Touch nor haptic feedback.
No multi-device pairing
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
AirPods use intelligent pairing. They can effectively stay paired to multiple devices at once, so that switching between your Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad and Mac is seamless. If you have multiple Macs sharing one desk, you might not want two mice, or two keyboards or two trackpads. It can get confusing and crowded.
But alas, all of Apple’s latest peripherals still use vanilla Bluetooth, and don’t take advantage of Apple’s own technology elsewhere.
Apple’s answer to that need is Universal Control, which lets one mouse control multiple devices — even a Mac and iPad — but that only works if all the devices are next to each other and on the same Apple account. If you have a work laptop and a personal laptop, they’re probably on different Apple accounts. Continuity isn’t true multi-device pairing; the mouse only stays paired to one Mac, which acts as a relay. Take that Mac away, and your Magic Mouse won’t be connected to the other one.
The port on the bottom
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
The ergonomics and the lack of modern features are justifiable knocks against the Magic Mouse. The port on the bottom is not.
The battery life is insane. You rarely need to charge it. And when the battery starts to run low, you get not one, but two notifications on your Mac that you need to plug it in soon. You have multiple chances to plug it in at the end of your workday, or whenever is convenient.
If you somehow miss both of these warnings and run your mouse battery dry, just a few minutes gives it enough juice for another full workday.
But why is it there in the first place? Because if it was on the front, there would be a big square wart and it would ruin the symmetry of the design. That’s not a tradeoff Apple is willing to make for something that isn’t actually a problem.
Worse than the reality of the port on the bottom is that it’s a punching bag for social media. Except I always see it going viral among PC users who would never have considered buying a Magic Mouse, much less a Mac, in the first place.
At least the infamous port is now USB-C instead of Lightning, which is a welcome improvement.
Should you buy the new Apple Magic Mouse?
Photo: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
If you want a smooth capacitive scrolling mouse, yes. This is your only option.
But I would implore you to try out the Magic Trackpad. You also get free two-dimensional scrolling, even more multitouch gestures that use three fingers, Force Touch, Haptic Feedback and more. It’s been my preferred input device on the Mac ever since it debuted.
★★★☆☆
Buy from: Amazon (White)
Buy from: Amazon (Black)
- Multitouch gestures
- USB-C connector
- Slim design
- Black color is more expensive
Apple did not provide Cult of Mac with a review unit for this article. See our reviews policy, and check out other in-depth reviews of Apple-related items.
