I went out and bought a brand new Magic Mouse for my Mac Studio today. I’ve been meaning to try one for ages, and heard great things about the gestures. I’ve had a Magic Trackpad for years and enjoyed gestures, but find them annoying for video editing, where I prefer a mouse. My current model is a Logitech MX Master 3 (white, made for Mac), but it skips badly at times, possibly due to wireless congestion even with a Bolt receiver. I tried connecting it via Bluetooth but… well Bluetooth hates me, and I hate Bluetooth, and it’s a long story.
A Magic Mouse seemed the perfect answer. I put $80 on the proverbial table at the Apple Store, brought it home, followed the tiny instructions in the tiny booklet, saying that I should connect the USB-C cable with my Mac, switch it on and it would magically be paired.
Turns out that was a lie. It doesn’t actually connect that way. No worries I thought, I’ll just use the regular Bluetooth pairing option, knowing full well that Bluetooth hates me, and that I hate Bluetooth, which was designed to be a non-performant tragic incompatible mess since its inception in the nineties to this very day. Nevertheless it worked, was properly recognised as Magic Mouse and I was whizzing around the screen.
With one small caveat: Magic Mouse didn’t recognise any gestures.
And I don’t mean anything fancy like switching Desktop spaces or invoking Mission Control. It didn’t even scroll. It was just a dumb totally non-magic mouse. Surely it’s just a tick box somewhere. Surely mature technology like the Magic Mouse that’s been around for DECADES does gestures, why else would I have even considered it? Did anyone on the world wide web have a solution?
Quite the opposite: everyone seemed to have the same problem!
And here’s why: there are various versions of the Magic Mouse – but of course Apple don’t tell you this. Much like the 4+ pencil versions they have, or the several dozen iPad models they keep updating every 5 minutes. And here’s the tragic news:
The USB-C version of Magic Mouse only works with macOS Sequoia 15.1 or later
Yeah. That’s an OS I won’t be upgrading to anytime soon for various reasons. This means I have absolutely no use for this $80 paperweight and its cute little box.
You can’t even fault Apple for that, as the box clearly states we need “the latest version of macOS”, although that message may have been on there for several years – what do I know. It does however clearly say in the small print of the “product compatibility” section that this thing needs macOS 15.1, or iPadOS 18.1 to even operate.
How they can get away with this is beyond me. There is some good news though:
The Lightning version of Magic Mouse works with anything up to macOS Sonoma 14.x and beyond
That’s right: there’s an older version of the Magic Mouse that’s been around for a while. It’s called exactly the same thing, but of course Apple won’t sell anything with that embarrassing Lightning Connector officially anymore. If it’s older than 5 minutes it gets recycled and never mentioned again. Amazon still have plenty of these lying around though, and THAT’S the version I should have bought.
Here’s a link that gives us a choice for both versions: https://amzn.to/4hg4FJG
Link works at the time of writing, which means it could be broken in about 5mins because… nothing lasts forever and you should chuck all your tech in the trash and re-purchase it every month because that keeps people like Apple in business.
And that’s why we can’t have gestures with a Magic Mouse.
Another tech mystery solved!