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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Let's be clear here -- I'm the first to admit Apple haven't made a mouse worth using in the last ten years. All their mice in the post-ball era have been mediocre or miserable. (I currently use a DeathAdder 2013.)

But their full size corded keyboard is brilliant. Haven't used anything that feels half as good. Haven't seen anything that looks half as good.

Oh, and their trackpads are brilliant too.

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Maybe I'm weird here, but I think the Magic Mouse is really great and comfortable to use.

I love my magic mouse as well. I wish they made a corded one though, or made bluetooth stuff more reliable.

One silly thing in OS X is that if you have only a wireless keyboard and mouse, and accidentally turn off Bluetooth, it is really difficult to figure out what to do next. The usual advice is "attach a wired mouse and keyboard and turn it back on", but if you don't have one, lots of luck.

You can actually recover from this with a full power down and restart, OS X tries to detect this condition and turn Bluetooth back on. But sometimes it doesn't work and requires a PRAM reset.

The Magic Mouse is indeed the best mouse they've built to-date. But I'll still take an original Microsoft Intellimouse Optical because it fits my hand better and has a good weight & glide to it. Apple should design their mice & keyboards around the human form first, with cool design secondary to that.

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about mice and it occurred to me that I hadn't given the Magic Mouse a fair go. So I went out and bought one full price. Switching from the DeathAdder 2013 I immediately noticed a few differences:

* Friction of movement was higher and "stickier" regardless of surface. * Grip was less comfortable because I had to push my fingers against the top edge. * Cursor motion was noticeably lagged and jerky. Admittedly this is going from a corded gaming mouse to a bluetooth mouse, but I don't care. I didn't want cordless anyway.

My only problem with the DeathAdder is that the Mac drivers are horrifically bad and the third party alternatives (SteerMouse etc) aren't much better. I've found that I can configure some settings on a Windows box which configure firmware in the mouse itself (mostly DPI modes and disabling the lights). Get these settings right and it works pretty well plugged into a Mac with no third party mouse software.

For the feels, look no further than any mechanical keyboard.

For the looks - it is a matter of personal taste, but I agree Apple keyboards are elegant.

There are times where mechanical keyboard just doesn't fit. I own a few at home, but in my super quite office, it's a different story, and Apple Keyboard is the least painful alternative after trying many non-mech keyboards, including arguably-mechanical HHKB Pro 2 and MS Ergo 4000.

Yes, mechanical keyboards are superior. And the previous Apple ones were good.

But given the form factor limitation, the Apple ones are pretty good (better than the previous notebook keyboards, I don't know the name of the keyboard types)

Mechanical keyboards are nice if that's all you're ever going to use. But I spend 1/3 my time on a MacBook Air, and my fingers really appreciate the consistency of feel between it and my desktop keyboard.

Has anyone made a mechanical keyboard with short travel distance?

Eh. I use the Logitech K250 keyboard because my hands literally start to ache after an hour of using their keyboards. Wired or wireless, built into the laptop or no. And the Magic Trackpad is, for my money, a mess--it forgets that the big plus of a laptop trackpad being a trackpad is that it's already right beneath the spacebar, you barely have to move for it. But for me, the Magic Mouse couples gestures and a reasonable pointing device in a really great way.

I thought they'd finally cracked it with the touch-surface magic mouse, I really did. Solidly built, nice to the touch, perfect click action, responsive touch sensitivity. Wow!

To celebrate, I fired up Borderlands to see how well it worked in a game. Started out great. Accurate and responsive, effortless to use.

Then I tried zooming in with a telescopic sight (right-click and hold), then shooting with a left-click at the same time. You can't. Because the top surface is a roicker, you can either right-click or left-click but not both at the same time. Fail!

But they were sooo close this time....

Oh, don't get me wrong, I use a Logitech G2 for games. But for day-to-day work I use the Magic Mouse.

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