Look everyone! New iMacs! But look closer and you’ll whoop with joy at Apple’s best new/updated product in six years.
Forget about new iPhones, new iPads and slotless MacBooks. Apple has finally made its mouse truly great.
Nearly six years ago to the day (20 October 2009) Apple replaced the dust-n-dirt–loving Mighty Mouse with something that did away with the little scrolling ball. The Magic Mouse wasn’t really magic but its multi-touch shell was a thing of elegant simplicity. See also: Best mouse for Mac.
Underneath the Magic Mouse, sadly, was another matter altogether.
The wireless Magic Mouse of course relied on batteries and these were accessed via the underside metal plate.
One day when Jony Ive had a cold, was on holiday, or kidnapped by aliens, one of the interns (still nursing a hangover from some campus party) in the Apple design labs created this plate where users could swap out faded batteries for newly charged power cylinders.
That metal Magic Mouse plate is one of the worst things ever to come out of Apple.
It doesn’t fit properly ever, and is super fiddly to get almost right. Are you meant to first slot the top bit with the On/Off button or the bottom bit with the pesky black plastic thing? Either way, it stinks.
You think you’ve slotted it in correctly, and then CLANG! it falls off again. Every time, your love of Apple and respect for its design gods dies a little. Sometimes a lot. CLANG! See, it did it again.
Now that Apple has done away with the batteries altogether, the Metal Plate of Clinking Doom is no more. Rejoice!
All you have to do is insert a Lightning cable – you’ve got plenty of those, right? – to recharge the Magic Mouse. Sadly, that same Apple intern insisted that the charging port be placed away from sight on the underside of the new Magic Mouse 2, meaning you can’t use it while it’s charging. Having a retro wired mouse again would have been fun, and would allow work to continue when the mouse ran out of juice. Instead you need to steal/borrow someone else’s mouse to carry on working, or (Apple hopes) splash out £65 on a second one.
So three cheers for stopping that damn backplate falling off, but a big groan for not thinking properly about where to place the Lightning cable slot.
Author: Simon Jary, Contributing writer
Simon was Editor of Macworld from the dark days of 1995 to the triumphant return of Steve Jobs and the launch of the iPhone. His desk is a test bench for tech accessories, from USB-C and Thunderbolt docks to chargers, batteries, Powerline adaptors and Fitbits.