Magic Mouse users over at the Apple.com Discussion Board have been complaining that their multitouch mice require almost weekly battery swaps for a couple of months now. Apple has yet to officially acknowledge the problem, but an experiment by Softpedia confirms the issue.
The good news? It’s not really the Magic Mouse: it’s an issue with the Magic Mouse’s power management software. The bad news: that doesn’t really change anything until Apple issues a fix.
The experiment was simple: Softpedia plugged a fresh set of batteries into their Magic Mouse then let the batteries drain until the Magic Mouse software reports the batteries are dead. Softpedia then took these “dead” batteries and plugged them into an old Mighty Mouse. Voila! According to the Mighty Mouse software, the batteries still had as much as 40% charge remaining.
That’s a pretty astonishing bug. According to Softpedia, even a 50% charge isn’t sufficient to power a Magic Mouse in some cases. If Softpedia’s experiment is true, Apple needs to fix this bug, pronto.
Now, I’ve long since sworn off trusting Apple to sell me a mouse, so I can’t confirm this: that leaves it up to you. Anyone willing to give Softpedia’s experiment a shot and let me know how it goes for them in the comments?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
16 responses to “Magic Mouse power management software reports batteries dead at nearly half charge”
Ya, my magic mouse would not connect to my computer and I knew my batteries were not dead. I put those “dead” batteries from the magic mouse, put them in my old mighty mouse and the charge was at 80% !!!!
This has only been an issue for a couple of days now (since Oct. 24). Â Google search brought me to here! Â Glad to know I am not going insane. Â Thanks John. Â Although it is strange how old your post is… Why is this happening now?