Magic Mouse Woes...
Friday, November 13, 2009 at 7:21AM Well it looks like the honeymoon is well and truly over!
Had a couple of issues with the magic mouse over the last couple of days:
Tracking - The mouse seemed to lose it's accuracy tracking across the screen. The Twittersphere suggested I install a third part Pref Pane utility - MouseZoom - to fix this. I did as was suggested and whilst it improved the speed of tracking, it did nothing for the lack of accuracy. Another issue may have been the surface, I was using the MM on a wooden desk so I started using a laminated mouse mat.
Still no joy.
An examination of the underside of the mouse gave no clues until, I popped off my glasses and held the mouse lens about two centimetres from my eye. I suffer with extreme shortsightedness but my eyesight is fantastic from this distance!
Ah ha!
Tiny, tiny particles seemed to be stuck to the lens. A careful wipe with the corner of a damp tissue seemed to clean it up and tracking accuracy was restored.
Dropped Connections - Happy that tracking had been fixed, I continued using the MM for a day or so. Then came the 10.6.2 update. I installed successfully onto the Mac Pro during the evening of its release and all was good. The next day however, the mouse dropped its bluetooth connection, not once, but four times! I can't remember it dropping the connection a single time prior to the 10.6.2 release.
Luckily, it's possible to reconnect the mouse using the keyboard, but it's a pain I could do without.
The battery is still over 60% so surely it can't be that causing the dropouts?
I'll give it a few more days to see if it settles down, but despite the lovely scrolling of the new Magic Mouse, I fear its days may be numbered.
As an aside, Ross Judice (@odisphincter) over on twitter gave me some food for thought. He suggested:
Try a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch tablet as your sole input device. Love mine. Gestures, buttons, pen, programmable
Hmm!
Reader Comments (12)
The tracking on my Magic Mouse us awful as well. It is on the same surface the the Mighty Mouse used so that should be fine. I will check the fix you suggest.
I love the Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch tablet. It also works great with Windows 7.
I bought 2 Magic Mice (one for my MacPro and one for my 24" iMac) and one 27" iMac (which includes the Magic Mouse).
On the 27" it runs smooth - no problems at all.
On the MacPro, I had lots of problems - mainly uneven movement. Even if I moved the mouse around in a smooth, even speed, the pointer didn't.
The MacPro has two 30" monitors connected, and even set at max movement speed, the Magic Mouse takes significantly more hand movement to move the pointer across screen than my Logictech Revolution does.
Don, my main issue with Apple on such problems is those darn adverts they run where they make windows sound awful and yet, with these MM issues you would think it was a windows problem and not a Mac problem... its just works, right?
I can highly recommend Wacom, I use an Intous3 A4 tablet for my work all the time and it has NEVER let me down. Unlike my Mac which still has problems from time time and makes me feel I must be in a parallel universe or something as my Mac is not the one that is described in those Apple commercials... Hello I'm Windows, ..and I'm a Mac, so windows your mouse never has problems right? - That's right mac, always works but how is your new mouse? - Jesh, don't mention it to me, it has problems just like the other mouse, that one had a tracking wheel that never worked!
Apple I feel should really address these issues as I am slowly dropping out of the fan zone for the Mac and would even consider switching back to Windows in the future.
I hear what you're saying Steve!
I never say to anyone that Macs never have issues, they are just computers after all, and things do wrong from time to time.
However, in comparison to Windows computers, I'm still pretty confident that Macs and OSX are still head and shoulders above PCs in terms of reliability and ease of use.
Following on from my blog post, I received a lot of tweets from people who are having no problems whatsoever with their Magic Mouse and are extremely happy with it. I've been using mine all morning and wouldn't you know, it hasn't dropped the connection once today!
As far as switching back to Windows, it would take a lot more than a misbehaving mouse for me to even consider that!
If fact, I can't envisage any scenario ;-)
Just got a Bamboo Pen & Touch for the Imac in the office. Takes a little getting used to but I am very impressed by the speed and accuracy. I still have a few more hours I'd like to spend on it before I give it the final verdict, but right now I'm thinking it will stay.
I'm with you Don. I really wanted Apple to score a home run (goal) with this one but I knew they had not after trying one for about 10 minutes, at the Apple store. It just still did not feel right. Now I read articles like this and many others and hate to say, that all that is Apple is not shinny all the time.
I too had all the problems with the Magic Mouse on my Mac Pro. MouseZoom really helped with the tracking. I still was getting the dropped connections. I noticed that the battery charge had dropped to 60% in less than a week of use. I replaced the included Energizer batteries with new batteries (Energizer). I have had no connections problems for the past 4-5 days and no other problems (knock on wood).
I love the scrolling so I really want to keep this mouse. I would assume that Apple will be able to release updates for the mouse to extend functionality so I want to keep using it.
Also I haved used SteerMouse and I understand they are trying to support the Magic Mouse.
Jim
No problems here. Love it, love it, love it. I have a Windows friend who is quite envious.
I also have a magic mouse which is less than satisfactory with jerky movements (sometimes fewer, sometimes worse). My tracking speed is ok when cranked up to full in sys prefs. There's several discussions on Apple's forums generally under either iMac or Bluetooth. Some people are reporting elimination of the problem by buying a 3rd party external bluetooth receiver for the mac and one person offers a rewiring solution for MacPros claiming that the wrong wires are connected in the MacPro between airport and bluetooth. The solutions I just mentioned and the experience of others can be found in this thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2216828
As I said in the above thread, I would love to hear an explanation from the chap at Apple who gave the final go ahead on this product. I'll add that I still have a Mighty Mouse and it does not suffer these problem. I cleaned the lens on my magic mouse as you suggested but no improvement. Oddly things are considerably worse today with our intense London rain and wind.
At first I loved my magic mouse but unfortunately I'm having problems.
When I first used the mouse it even worked usably on a transparent glass table, now it doesn't. Like others I have experienced connectivity issues and at one point had to create a new bluetooth pair, OSX 10.6.2 had simply 'lost' the mouse completely.
Battery life isn't great, my old wireless mighty mouse was much better, but then I spotted 'the fudge' Apple had done, anything to save a bit of money?
The wireless Mighty Mouse had been supplied with lithium batteries as standard (very expensive, but their life span was reassuring). The Magic Mouse however comes with alkaline cells. No wonder they loose capacity so quickly!
I've had my Magic Mouse for a week and its battery is showing 75%. Hardware is a 14 month old 24" iMac.
There is a problem with the Mac Pro and Bluetooth< I have written a tutorial blog how to fix it.
http://nobblynoel.wordpress.com