Magic vs Mighty
Posted by pianowow on December 5, 2009
I was debating about this for some time after Apple announced its new mouse, the Magic Mouse. I’ve had my Mighty Mouse for about 9 months, and had only one complaint about it so far. My main concern about the Magic Mouse was about the clicking behavior. It wasn’t clear from Apple’s material on it that it actually still “clicks”. I thought perhaps it would just sense a click with a touch of the finger, but after testing it in the Apple store, I was pleasantly surprised that it does in fact click. I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t able to rest my finger on the mouse as I was using it. I decided to go ahead and buy the Magic Mouse today.
My one problem with the Mighty Mouse is with the tiny trackball used for scrolling, middle clicking. At first there were no issues, but a few months ago, one of the directions (up) stopped working. It would scroll right, left and down, but not up. Odd… So I did some digging and there are some very creative ways to clean off the gunk that builds up underneath the track ball. Too bad Apple didn’t provide some easy way of getting the ball out and cleaning under it. You basically have to disassemble the entire device to do that successfully. But with a little compressed air, it’s just about good as new.
The scrolling on a touch device should be more reliable, so the Magic Mouse solves that problem for sure. Another problem I have with the Magic Mouse is the lack of middle-click, which I use in firefox to open new tabs (and close tabs) all the time. But there is software (BetterTouchTool) out there to support that. You can enable middle-click with two- or three-finger click. So that solves that. The other problem is the Magic Mouse just feels less confortable under my hand than my Mighty Mouse. The Mighty Mouse was all curves and felt very natural. The Magic Mouse has hard edge to it, which I suppose was necessary for clearly delimiting where the touch functionality would work and where it wouldn’t, but it still feels different under my hand. Some thing else that has changed in the feel department is that the sides of the mouse are now metal, which means they feel cold in comparison to the white plastic the older mouse had.
I wish they had made a wired version of the Magic Mouse. I’m not wild about changing batteries in something I use every day. Suppose I happen to be out of AA batteries when the mouse finally decides to die… That does not sound like a fun situation. It does come with its own Energizer batteries pre-installed, so that was nice.
On the positives, the scrolling on the Magic Mouse is flawless. I was very impressed. The two-finger swipe is a nice addition as well. I checked, and you can use that feature to change tabs in firefox, so that it functions a lot like iPhoto does. The tracking is laser, which basically does away with the need for a mouse pad. But I still keep mine for sentimental/habitual reasons.
I suppose it’s worth mentioning that the side buttons have also been removed, but I never used those anyway. I set the side buttons to Exposé, so that would happen suddenly, unexpectedly on occasionally when gripping the mouse too tight. To me, the lack of side buttons is a good thing. I won’t get surprised by all my windows spreading out again.
In summary, the Magic Mouse is a cold, industrial, better replacement to the organic-feeling Mighty Mouse. It solves my one issue with the Mighty Mouse, and adds some new features, like two-finger swipe. Well done, Apple.
Ric Ocasek said
Oh oh it’s magic