For a mouse to have good contact with a relaxed hand it needs to be thicker than the Magic Mouse, especially near the back end. Make it fit our hands: Left/right symmetry is a fine design goal (and left-handed users will thank you), but front/back symmetry just doesn’t match the shape of our hands. Don’t reinvent the wheel, just make the best damn wheel on the market. Simple up-and-down scrolling with a nice fat wheel feels good, works in every application, is discoverable and intuitive, and doesn’t make the mouse move around like touch gestures do. Give it a scroll wheel: Apple’s never made a mouse with a proper scroll wheel, but there’s a reason they refuse to go away on third-party mice. Just ask your keyboard designers! We need a left and right buttons. Nothing beats the actual tactile sensation of moving parts with proper travel and bounce. In the off chance that Apple wants to make its first great mouse in a generation, here are a few simple suggestions.īring back real buttons: Give us real, physical buttons that travel and click. If I thought Apple cared about mice at all anymore, I would imagine it was embarrassed. By comparison, Apple’s mice have held the coveted spot of “first thing you should replace on your Mac” for two decades. Compared to the responsiveness and precision offered by the best mice, Apple’s first-party pointing device feels downright sluggish.Īpple’s trackpads are smooth, precise, intuitive, and a joy to use. Has nobody at Apple ever used other wireless mice?Įven if you get past all that, the fundamental experience of using a Magic Mouse isn’t as good as most third-party mice. Simply putting this port along the front edge would let you use your mouse like a traditional wired mouse while it charges. It’s too low and flat for a palm-style grip, and doesn’t have enough vertical edge to make for a comfortable claw-style grip.Īpple updated the Magic Mouse to get rid of the replaceable batteries and instead offer charging via Lightning connector a good idea, if only it hadn’t put the Lightning connector on the bottom of the mouse so you have to tip your mouse onto its side or back to charge it, rendering it useless. The symmetrical front-to-back slope doesn’t fit the contours of one’s hand. The ambidextrous nature of the shape is appealing, but it otherwise doesn’t offer good ergonomics for a mouse. Swiping and pinching on a stationary trackpad is fine, but it just isn’t a great interaction on a device made to glide effortlessly across your desk. It’s almost impossible to make use of them without accidentally moving the mouse around. Gestures sound like a good idea, but they’re impractical on a mouse. This allows for left- and right-clicking and scrolling (though the default configuration is for a one-button mode), along with gestures to do things like open up Dashboard or Expose. Once again loathe to mar it’s beautiful mouse with gauche buttons, Apple turned the whole click area into a multi-touch trackpad of sorts. It sure is pretty, but it’s hard to hold, and gestures are useless.Īpple’s Magic Keyboard is fantastic. It boggles the mind that anyone at Apple actually used this and said, “yeah, ship it!” Magic Mouse Apple So you had to lift one finger first and then tap the right side of the mouse with your other finger. The mouse would only right-click if there was no touch sensed on the left mouse button area. It was the most ergonomic and well-designed mouse (for its time) that Apple has ever produced. While it still should have had a right mouse button, this was the clear apex of Apple mouse design. This may be the most ergonomic mouse Apple’s ever made.Ī few years later, Apple updated the ADB mouse with a new plastic shell that gave it a teardrop shape, with a bulbous back side. The teardrop ADB Mouse II Stephen Edmonds Apple commonly mistakes additional buttons as additional complexity, but holding down the control key and clicking, or long-clicking, is not simpler and more intuitive than clicking a right mouse button. If we had one finger on our hands rather than four, our hands might be simpler, but our interactions with the world would likely be more complicated. For some reason, Apple’s reluctance to have more than one mouse button would plague its design ethos for ages. This is where Apple should have introduced a second mouse button. It came first with the Apple IIGS, then later to the Mac. This was, for the time, a legitimately good mouse, with superior ergonomics. It was still boxy, but the “fat end” moved to the back, and the whole thing was slimmer with a flatter button. With the switch to the Apple Desktop Bus, Apple refined its mouse. The first ADB mouse was an ergonomic improvement, while sticking to the blocky lines of the computers of the day.