An engineer hacked Apple’s infamous Magic Mouse to make it more user-friendly, ergonomic, and overall less annoying. Ivan Kuleshov is the said engineer, and he has also hacked the Apple Mac Mini in the past to be powered over Ethernet.
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Apple’s Magic Mouse is known for being annoying. It features a highly unergonomic body that is inconvenient to use and a charging port that’s, out of all places it could have been in, under the mouse. This means you cannot use your mouse while it is charging. Also, it still sports a Lightning port instead of a Type-C, which is inconvenient since most Apple peripherals have already made the switch.
Kuleshov recently shared on X that he has created “the world’s first ergonomic Magic Mouse with no weaknesses” and that “you can charge it via USB-C right while you’re working.” In the same Twitter thread, he walked us through the details. First, he shows us the different enclosure iterations he went through until he found one he was content with.
Then he shows us where he’s reengineered the mouse so that connecting it to a power source “charges directly the battery, so the mouse doesn’t turn off while charging. […] the percentages increase even though the OS thinks the mouse is running on battery.” Then, he posts a picture of an extension adapter that he made and writes, “The sensor touches the table like the original mouse, with no gaps or mirrors.”
He also posted a video of how the mouse works, followed by a disassembly video. He ends the thread by teasing us with a black variant of the mouse and one with RGB lighting. Kuleshov also adds that he knows there’s room for improvement and will share this project on his site and GitHub “in the coming days.”
Interestingly enough, there have been past attempts at fixing the Magic Mouse, like when Matty Benedetto, behind the famous YouTube channel Unnecessary Inventions, 3D printed a lifter for the back of the Magic Mouse 2 that rolled around on a pair of metal ball bearings. The lift allowed the mouse to slide around a desk while connecting to a power source and recharging. But, sadly, that failed.