OK, now that I’ve had a little time to play with my new Quad Core iMac (i7, everything else standard) I thought I’d do a series of posts on how I’m finding it. This first one won’t be about the machine, it will be about the Magic Mouse that comes standard with the machine. I’m starting with this because it’s the most annoying thing about my new setup.

The Magic Mouse is Apple’s latest bluetooth mouse for their Macs. It’s sleek and stylish like most things Apple but the revolutionary thing about this mouse is that it has a multi-touch sensitive top and therefore no mouse ball/wheel. It’s totally smooth and I must say totally gorgeous.

There are 5 factors regarding the mouse that I want to talk about. Build, Ergonomics, Tracking, Button surface and Battery and I’ll tackle them in that order.

Build (A)

There’s very little I can fault about the build quality of this mouse. Seriously it has to be not only the sexiest mouse I’ve seen but also the most solid feeling. Given the fact that there is no ball or wheel, means that there’s pretty much two pieces to the unit; the bottom and the top. The top is a lovely white surface (Clear cover with white underneath) and is decorated with a light grey Apple logo at the bottom. The underneath looks like anodised metal (It is in fact plastic) and contains the battery cover (This mouse is wireless), power switch, laser and foot pads.

Ergonomics (C-)

“C-!!” I hear you scream? Yup, I have to give this mouse a low score on ergonomics. The main culprit is the low profile nature of the mouse. It is so low I cannot rest my hand on it easily and have my finger tips still on the mouse for swiping. If I raise my hand so that my fingers fit, then I put more strain on my wrist as it heads more towards a 90 degree angle. I then have to move my wrist in an arc in order to move the cursor. And given the fact that the screen is 27″ in size on my iMac, that’s a big arc, especially if you use the default mouse tracking settings as I will talk about next. Even Apples images on their site show someone holding their mouse like it’s a dainty little thing that you tinkle with.

What I need to qualify this score with though, is that you need to take your hand size into account. While I don’t think I have overly large hands I have longish fingers but if you were blessed with hands the size of fieldmice, you should be OK.

After a week of use I am already finding the mouse rather tiresome on my hands, wrists and arms and if I cannot find a way to alleviate the discomfort I will probably go back to my $20 no-name mouse with scroll wheel.

Tracking (B-)

In my opinion, tracking has always been a weak point of Apple mice and this mouse is no exception. The maximum speed that you can move the mouse is borderline unusable on something like my iMac with it’s 27 inch screen. I would find myself having to move the mouse miles across my desk to get from one side to the other and if you use a mouse pad, forget it, you’ll fall off the edge before you get there. You will need to get a utility called MouseZoom which allows you to increase the speed of your mouse tracking. I have mine set to 10, which is the maximum MouseZoom allows, whereas Apple’s maximum is 1.7 on that same scale (i.e. my tracking speed is nearly 6 times faster). Now that I have MouseZoom installed the mouse works pretty well.

Button surface (A+)

The surface of the mouse is a single piece of Apple’s mojo infilled acrylic like substance. In order to scroll just swipe your finger along the surface as you would with a scroll ball. It is also multi-touch aware so you can scroll two fingers horizontally to navigate forward and backwards in Finder, your web browser (It works fine with Chromium) or other application. These features can be altered within the System Preferences to turn them on or off, switch buttons and set sensitivities.

Magic Mouse System Preferences

There is nothing bad I can say about the touch sensitivity of the mouse so far. It works flawlessly, scrolling when I ask it and not scrolling when I don’t. Additionally, because the scrolling allows for momentum you get a more natural feel to your movements when using it.

The scrolling seems like Apple over-compensated for the abysmal product that was the Mighty Mouse. A single surface mouse with a tiny ball that worked beautifully for about a month then never worked again. That mouse ball had to be cleaned so regularly that you spent more time doing that than using your computer and then eventually it just stopped working. I don’t think there are many people I know who still have a working Mighty Mouse, and I know several that have been smashed in frustration once they stopped working.

Battery (B+)

Wireless mice are both a boon and a bane. Less cables is oh-so-much better but having to put batteries in the thing all the time is annoying as all hell. So far though I must say I’m happy. As you can see in the screenshot of the System Preferences panel above, my mouse is sitting at 87% battery life. These are the standard batteries that ship with the mouse and I have had the machine a total of 6 days. I only use my machine out of work hours at home for about 20 hours a week, so if you work it all out that’s about 130 hours on a set of 2 AA batteries. I’m fine with that, especially seeing as I will move to rechargables.

As expected, the bluetooth worked flawlessly and when I turned on my iMac for the first time it was detected and started working without a hitch…once I turned the power on on the mouse of course.

Summary

To finish off, the mouse is a solid and sexy performer with poor ergonomics. The touch screen tech is great, however I don’t have to have a fancy touch surface on my mouse when I just want to scroll. Any other mouse on the planet does that well enough with the old scroll wheel. It’s just Apple that can’t make mice with wheels/balls.

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Apple, Computers, Mac, Magic Mouse, Review