Can you fix the Magic Mouse by sticking it into an ergonomic shoe?

Can you fix the Magic Mouse by sticking it into an ergonomic shoe?

The Magic Mouse’s new shoe. | Image: Wes Davis / The Verge

This past Christmas, there was a box in my stocking that held something I had half-jokingly added to my wishlist: an “ergonomic” grip that raises, widens, and adds wireless charging to Apple’s Magic Mouse 2. It’s like a little boot with a Lightning adapter tongue that plugs right into your Magic Mouse’s underbelly. Best of all, it’s magnetic, making it perfect for use with a MagSafe puck.

Does this thing totally ruin the sleek Apple aesthetic? Absolutely! And I’m not even remotely convinced by its cheap-feeling plastic that it will last longer than a few months before it just stops working. Yet, somehow, it’s exactly what the Magic Mouse needs.

What it’s called doesn’t really matter, because this isn’t a product any company you’ve ever heard of makes — instead, it showed up on Amazon, seemingly around August or so, under several different company names. Mine is branded Tatofy, but you can find it under brand names like Zeehoo, Bluerin, or Superyofo. They’re all like 30 bucks, and they’re almost certainly all exactly the same product.

Image: Wes Davis / The Verge

This fix for the Magic Mouse 2 is practical, not pretty.

The housing’s grip isn’t perfect. Wireless charging can be iffy sometimes, and the magnet is very weak, so it’ll slip right off of a MagSafe stand. And where the bottom part of it meets the top, there’s a giant seam that loves to collect crud.

But those complaints are so minor. In fact, I’ve found myself using my Magic Mouse at least as often as my Logitech MX Master 3 over the last month. And plunking it onto a nearby MagSafe puck when I’m done with it is a much nicer experience than digging out a Lightning cable every time it dies. But boy is it silly that it’s come to this.

When the Magic Mouse came out, I was genuinely enamored with the multitouch surface that did all these different things using swipes and taps. This single, curved sheet of clear plastic that could do so much felt like the future, especially next to the Magic Trackpad, which is still the best trackpad in the tech world.

Image: Wes Davis / The Verge

The Tatofy grip without the Magic Mouse.

But in practice, it’s just so very awkward. The mouse is low and flat, and I’ve never found a comfortable way to hold it during use — do I lay my hand on it like a big, fleshy blanket? Hold it on either side with my fingertips? I do the latter, even though my hand ends up cramping as a result sometimes. And flipping the Magic Mouse over to charge has always felt silly, even if it’s ultimately not that inconvenient. As more devices adopt wireless charging or USB-C, it’s a minor annoyance having to keep a Lightning cable nearby. This grip fixes both of those problems.

Image: Wes Davis / The Verge

Magnetic charging is the way forward.

Still, I think this goofy shoe I’ve put on my mouse might be more band-aid than a full fix. Yeah, it’s way more comfortable, to me, than using the Magic Mouse on its own, but its very existence is almost an affront to decency after 15 years of virtually the same mouse — surely by now, Apple could have come up with something more practical. And yet, here is my Magic Mouse, just hanging out in a shoe, somehow both better and worse than it ever was.