Magic Mouse Hurts My Fingers and Other Complaints -- Anyone Have Advice?

The Magic Mouse is a design and technological triumph for Jonathan Ive and team, but an absolute ergonomic disaster for a ton of unlucky users, including me. "Uncomfortable to use" is a nice way to put it. Google "Mighty Mouse hurts hand" or similar topics and you'll find a lot of users have the same reaction. The sharp edges of the plastic top look great but hurt the fingers.

I got a Magic Mouse with my 27-inch iMac on Oct. 22. Within a day, the pad of my right thumb and the inside of my ring finger near the first joint -- the areas that grip all recent Apple mice -- began to hurt. After a week or so of use, during which my fingers developed constant bone bruise-like pain, I tried to ameliorate the situation by filing the top's sharp edges in the grip zone to a rounder shape. That helped, but only a little.

A month after trying to adjust to the Magic Mouse, I've retired it to a little show-off pedestal where visitors can ooh and aah. I've returned to using the bluetooth Mighty Mouse that came with my mid-2007 20-inch iMac 2.4 GHz.

My other major complaint about the Magic Mouse has to do with the left and right click functions. There's no trackpea to keep my index finger from wandering past the divide between left and right click zones. So in my attempts to move the Magic Mouse about without pain, my index finger wanders into right click territory and I can't tell you how many times I inadvertently right clicked when I meant to left click.

The touchpad-like scrolling functions work OK, but trying to use the Magic Mouse to navigate through the electronic edition of USA Today is a nightmare of jumpy incompatibility between the newspaper's on-screen software and the mouse's firmware/software. I have resorted to using just a plain vanilla Apple bluetooth mouse.

I also don't like the low height, which makes it difficult to move the MM around without gripping it awkwardly so it doesn't slip around. That, and the sharp edges, are not very user-friendly.

My grandson and I have experimented with a Microsoft bluetooth mouse, but we can't get it to play nice with Apple's bluetooth, whether it's in a 27-inch iMac, a 2007 20-inch iMac or a late 2006 Mac Mini.

Of all the current/recent Apple mice, the one I am most comfortable with is the wireless/lbluetooth Mighty Mouse. Its shape fits my hand, I like the ability to use the right click/left click functions, and the trackpea works very, very well. I also like the trackpea's click function as a way to bring up Dashboard. I deactivate the little side tab/wings because they're too sensitive to my grip as I move the MM around. I initially had some trouble with the trackpea getting clogged with crud, but I disassembled mine, cleaned it, and now run the trackpea upside down across a microfiber cloth every now and then and it continues to perform perfectly.

I have several Mighty Mice with cords. All of my comments above apply to them, but they have one problem common to all Apple mice with that elongated oval shape: the cord tends to get caught under the front edge and prevent up and down clicking movement.

I haven't investigated third-party mice, but the Magic Mouse fiasco (from my perspective) has pretty much convinced me that Apple hasn't yet quite figured out how to do mice. If anyone has advice (AppleCare? Replace with more hand-friendly mouse?), I'd be glad to get it.

-- Jim Scott