Apple on Tuesday introduced the Magic Mouse, a new $69 Bluetooth mouse that Apple bills “the world’s first multi-touch mouse.” It will be available in late October and comes bundled with Apple’s new iMacs.
The Magic Mouse eschews mechanical buttons, a scroll wheel and the scroll ball found on Apple’s Mighty Mouse all together, instead introducing a multi-touch surface that works across the entire top of the device.
This enables users to configure the mouse as a single or multi-button mouse, using finger gestures to scroll through documents, pan across images or move forward and backward through Web pages and other files. Such “multi-touch” gestures have become a defining characteristic of Apple’s laptop trackpads, and are heavily leveraged in the iPhone and iPod touch interfaces.
The Magic Mouse can operate wirelessly up to 10 feet away from a host computer. It runs on two AA batteries (included) and features power management.
The Magic Mouse requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later.
Minor correction to article: “Might Mouse” should be “Mighty Mouse.”
I also note that the Mighty Mouse seems to have been renamed Apple Mouse.
I am so glad they are dropping the scroll ball.
I have never seen any Mighty Mouse scroll ball work reliabley yet.
I have a logitech mouse simply because I got sick and tired of the scroll ball failing to work and continuously having to clean it.
In other words, hallelujah!
Jim
Just thinking about how easy that will be to clean makes me smile. I may actually keep this mouse when I get my next machine. (using a Razer Pro|Click on all my machines at the moment)
I’ll be picking one of these up tomorrow. Thank god they got rid of the awful scroll ball.
I also have been using a Logitech mouse and also a microsoft mouse both of which had the conventional scroll wheel, the touch features sound intriguing but after a brief chat with Jim on twitter i’ll grab one.
[…] in the last week. The company released a new Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server pre-installed, a new Magic Mouse, a new MacBook and new iMacs. We posted our review of the Magic Mouse and 27-inch iMac earlier this […]
[…] shipping the quad-core 27-inch iMac. Apple introduced the new iMacs in late October, along with the Magic Mouse and new […]