I object, sir! The Magic Trackpad is an outstanding peripheral and I will not have its honour besmirched on this fine platform.
The Magic Keyboard is what it is, which is a perfectly decent keyboard for mainstream users. I like it because it keeps the typing feel consistent between desktop and laptop. I'm sure I'd feel differently if I was writing a novel or into competitive gaming, but I don't, so I like it.
The Magic Mouse is an abomination. Not because the charging port location, sure it looks funny, but it's actually not an issue in real life. The actual problem is it's an ergonomic catastrophe. (Which is par for the course with Apple. In its 40+ year history, Apple has never once made a legitimately good mouse.)
Good sir, I withdraw my complaint of the "Magic Trackpad" because I feel no true animosity toward it. I have one of them, but have struggled to find a use for it.
But the "Magic Keyboard" is trash because the "butterfly" keyboard is trash, visited by the hack Jony Ive upon Apple customers for five inexcusable years. Sure, it's consistent with Apple laptops of the era, but if I could wade through shit all day every day for the sake of consistency... I wouldn't.
Even the current Apple keyboards don't approach the quality of the aluminum era; the time when the little Bluetooth one had the curved back edge where the batteries went. I'm typing on a full-sized aluminum desktop Apple keyboard of that era right now. These were the peak of modern Apple (and, I think, chiclet) keyboards in general.
It's sad what people accept for keyboard quality now. I totally understand the resurgence of mechanical keyboards, which are nothing but normal-quality keyboards of yesteryear.
Anyway, we're mostly in agreement here. I just think Apple should give up on the peripherals game, because they're singularly bad at it.
Oh yeah, we didn't even mention the Pencil that you were (are?) supposed to recharge by jamming it endwise into a port and have it sticking out the whole time...
I agree that the aluminium wired extended keyboard (A1243) is peak Apple keyboard and for over 15 years I used them on every device I owned, including Windows PCs. The Magic Keyboard isn't as good, but honestly I perform authentications often enough that integrated Touch ID is worth the marginal (IMHO) downgrade in key travel.
I have a post-butterfly MBP and I too find the built-in Touch ID great. I thought it would be a gimmick, but I use it all the time. Touch ID is one of the big reasons I won't get rid of my original iPhone SE (with the headphone jack right behind it).
But the continued lack of a real Delete key on Apple's laptops is annoying as shit. It has always been stupid, because everybody else manages to put a Delete key on their keyboards no matter how small. But when the Eject key became obsolete, the failure to put a Delete key on every keyboard just proved that Apple hasn't abandoned the infantile pettiness that has marked a lot of its history.
Thanks! But actually... you can't. Apple put a HARDWARE delay on the Eject button. Another WTF move from Apple. Were people being killed by accidental CD ejections?
Regardless of the reason, Apple (per its M.O.) implemented a ridiculously complicated and crippling "solution" instead of simply making Eject a secondary function on some other key... like a Delete key.
So I have always had to use F12 for Delete (via Karabiner).
That's insane. And it's indicative of the Apple approach to computing: do things exactly the way Apple wants and you'll have a brilliant time. (This is my approach when it comes to providing tech support for family. I steer them towards being model Apple citizens and they get great outcomes.)
I like the gestures on the magic mouse, especially the left/right scrolling. I use a Logitech MX Master at home and scrolling side to side never works well for me.
For ergonomics, both are seem to be fine for the way I hold my mouse.
God damn, it’s amazing they get away selling those. They spend so much effort on their software ux but their components for humans to interact with it are dark age’s torture devices from an ergonomics perspective. From a QoL perspective few things are more important.
Seriously. I joined Apple after they acquired our company, and our product required a three-button mouse. They wanted to show their acquisition off immediately at a trade show, but the fact that we brought proper third-party mice to our demo stations set off a minor storm of consternation and knitted brows among management. There was little they could do, however, and we ran the show with Logitech mice.
In classic Apple style, when they finally capitulated and added secondary buttons to their mice, they hid them. Actually, that was the second stupid move. The first was making the entire mouse body the button... so you couldn't keep the "button" pressed and then scroll, lift, scroll some more (because when you lifted the mouse, the button was released). So Apple's workaround wasn't to fix that stupid design, but rather to add little "wings" on the sides of the mouse that you could pinch with two fingers while somehow keeping the mouse mashed down with other fingers, in order to do multi-swipe scrolling.
The "Magic" mouse was an attempt to one-up legit mice by adding a touchpad to the back of the mouse... which you were somehow supposed to swipe sideways across with some fingers, while using other fingers to hold the mouse in place. It's just so gallingly dumb. There's not much else to say.
Oh... except the one where the charging wire goes into the BOTTOM of the mouse! I mean... you can't make this stuff up. Actually, you could, but "Polish" jokes aren't really PC anymore.
If you want a desktop trackpad, the Apple one is about the best you're going to get. The keyboard is, IMO, perfectly fine, and certainly one of the nicer-feeling non-mechanical keyboards around these days.
Yeah, I take it back about the trackpad. It's fine.
That stands in contrast to the ones on their computers, which are too big and cause spurious right-clicks and your cursor to jump to other parts of the screen while you're typing. Ridiculous.
What makes it worse is that the Pencil doesn't work on the giant computer trackpads. WHY? I would've bought that on day one. Talk about utter failure on Apple's part, year after year.
I find the trackpad isn’t necessary because the standard Mac desktop now is a laptop with external mouse keyboard and monitor. If I need the trackpad, there’s one built into the laptop.
You could go to the gaming mouse subreddit and find the latest cutting edge tech, but honestly pretty much any modern mouse will be an improvement from an ergo perspective. Finding one with a decent aesthetic is more of a challenge though.
There are always a lot of comments about ergonomics when the Magic Mouse is mentioned, but never a single citation. Been using one for 12+ years. The utility and ergonomics are great for me. The idea that something has to be shaped for a body part to be 'ergonomic' is pervasive, but I suspect it belongs with pseudoscientific claims such as using 10% of the brain.
Ergonomics is probably the wrong word to use but the magic mouse isn't a comfortable shape for most people. Less subjectively though it's sensor and tracking are terrible compared to modern sensors. All of this can be ignored for most typical work uses I suppose but what can't be ignored is the insanity of placing the charging port on the bottom of the mouse so you cant use it while charging.
Deadmau5 charging is a straight up swing and a miss but scrolling left and right hasn’t felt right on any other mouse on MacOS, and it’s something I seem to do a lot.
It's really short compared to other mice, even other ambidextrous ones. I can't really rest my hand on the magic mouse, it has to hover because of how short it is. This to me is uncomfortable long term. It also just has bad tracking and bad feet that make it bad to use.
I have big hands, the Magic Mouse is simply too small for me to hold naturally and quickly makes my hand cramp. I buy those things you stick to the sides to enlarge them, but they come unstuck within a couple of months.
As far as Logitech's quality has fallen, I'd still say they're better. I'm using a '90s wired Logitech plugged into a full-sized Apple aluminum keyboard right now, and this is pretty much the peak of Apple HID thus far.
The integration of two USB ports into the Apple keyboards of this era was an excellent innovation, which I use daily. Mouse on one side, thumbdrive on the other.
Even more innovative would be having the ports on a WIRELESS keyboard. Instead, we have various proprietary attempts at solving the mouse+keyboard problem.
