In a logical world, it should be the perfect mouse for Apple’s tablet. The Magic Mouse 2 itself easily fits in your pocket-probably better than any other mouse-so it complements the portability we should associate with the iPad. Users have embraced mouse support on the iPad in a big way, and you don’t have to dig far in order to find people showing off how they’ve made their iPads work (sort of) like a laptop or desktop computer. Apple’s mouse might look elegant, but it’s about the most inelegant means of interacting with its tablet.Īnd that’s quite the shame. Apple didn’t bother to include support for the Magic Mouse’s touch-based scroll gesture on the iPad, so unless you’re using a mouse with an actual scroll wheel, you’re stuck clicking on the screen and pulling down, much as you would if you were using your finger (but far more awkwardly). And it’s not like the Magic Mouse is all that useful on the iPad anyway, regardless of generation. So instead our only options are either to use another company’s mouse or to pair our iPads with an 11-year-old Apple mouse. Of course, it’s not like I could actually use the Magic Mouse 2 with a wired connection anyway, thanks to this infamous design flaw: If I hook up the Magic Mouse 2 with a wired connection, I can at least get the AssistiveTouch feature that powers the iPad’s mouse control to recognize that a mouse is attached, but I can’t actually move the pointer. I’ve tried multiple methods of hooking up devices through Bluetooth. (That’s true of my iPhone, too.) I’ve tried the backdoor route described in my how-to.
CAN YOU USE A MOUSE WITH IPAD 8TH GENERATION PRO
I’ve confirmed this with my own iPad Pro that’s running iPadOS 13.3.1, and nada-nothing works. Surely, they think, Apple wouldn’t pull support for one of its own products-and who could blame them?Īpparently, it did. The most frustrated users are those who never had a chance to see the mouse work at all, so they’re convinced they’re doing it wrong. But lately Macworld readers have been telling me that their Magic Mouse 2 no longer works on Apple’s tablet, and some of them have singled out January’s iPadOS 13.3 as the culprit. It worked well enough-for a while, anyway. Once upon a time, and not very long ago at that, you could use a Magic Mouse 2 with an iPad so long as you were running iPadOS 13.