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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

The last time I bought a Magic Mouse it lasted about 30 minutes. I installed some apps, loaded my family photos, then decided to try my favourite first person shooter and have some fun in high detail settings.

Right-click to zoom in the sniper rifle and - dang it, I can't shoot! The top is a single surface, so you can't hold down the right button and left click at the same time. Checks settings - no way to re-map aim to the keyboard.

MagicMouse -> Bin

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No love for that particular peripheral myself but; That’s completely on you, the Magic Mouse was never marketed as a gaming mouse. You can of course argue that it should be capable of what you expect from a mouse, but this is obviously a concept mouse aimed at doing other things.

I don’t see it as being a gaming specific issue, that’s just incidental. Why would anyone deliberately design an input device, so that the operation of different buttons was mechanically coupled in such a way as to arbitrarily limit their use in combination? I can easily imagine graphical design apps where you might want to do similar click-drag-alt/click combos. Or you might have a context menu opened by holding down the right mouse button, with checkboxes or multi-selectable options on it.

The answer is that "one button mouse" is a core part of Apple's identity, and having real independent buttons would mean admitting that it was a mistake.

I don't think Apple ever had a mouse with truly discrete left & right mouse buttons. Ever since the mighty mouse, they've used a single switch for both buttons but used touch sensors to differentiate between left and right clicks.

That's been true for every Apple mouse I've used and it's embarrassing that it's still the case. Between that and having to put the mouse on its back to charge, Apple is being brazenly ignorant. Sometimes I wonder if they even use their own products.

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