Look, long story short: I have newer Macs, wanted a Bluetooth mouse, and bought a Magic Mouse. I also still have a Mac Mini G4 with 10.4 and zero intentions of upgrading the old brick to 10.5. I tried the Magic Mouse with the G4 immediately after taking the Magic Mouse out of the plastic box and guess what? Not only does Apple's Magic Mouse work out of the box with 10.4, 10.4 recognizes right and left clicks. Not bad, huh?

Longer story: I've coveted the Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse 5000 for a long time. I found myself in the Office Depot this morning looking to buy a $15 Logitech USB mouse for my Toughbook and, in typical consumerist fashion, figured, "Why not throw that $15 at the Bluetooth model and use the old USB with your Toughbook?" This is the sort of thinking that gets you to buy a quad core iMac when you go in for a new Mini.

Still, I'll tell you why you don't throw in the $15 towards the Microsoft 5000. The 500 is still $50. For $20 more, I could grab a Magic Mouse and finally stop driving myself crazy grabbing scrollbars when I'm coding with my $20 Microsoft Blue USB special. I'd nearly talked myself into getting a new MacBook in large part for the multitouch trackpad, as having 360 degrees o' scroll would be wonderful. I was in the Best Buy just last week trying out the new MacBook. The touchpad really is wonderful.

So off to the Apple store to try the Magic Mouse out (and grab a Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter -- why I've left my old CRT monitor sitting in the corner for so long instead of running two monitors on my new Mini I have no idea). Scrolling with the Magic Mouse works great. There's not a goofy double-finger requirement to start scrolling, and it feels pretty natural. It's as if the entire mouse is a scroll wheel, finally delivering on the promise of the old Mighty Mouse with trackball. The mouse also has a good, solid feel to it.

I'm not sold on the swipe function yet, where two fingers allows you to move forward and back in your browser's history. The swipe in Safari is almost useful, I suppose. Swiping does a little less in iPhoto, and allows you to move between albums. In iPhoto, though, the albums are so close to one another, there's really no reason not to click on the next one normally, sans swipe. And if you have to swipe two or more albums over, well, there no time saved and the mouse is worthless. The two-finger swipe up on a mouse really isn't a particularly easy thing to do. When swiping, the mouse tends to move in ways your entire MacBook would not, and it's difficult to swipe anywhere other than the exact middle of the mouse. Swiping will, in other words, take some getting used to, which means I won't unless swiping starts doing something more useful.

Still, with Bluetooth and infinite-direction scroll combined the hope of a little more down the line (can I swipe into Expose with the next Magic Mouse update? Now we'd be getting somewhere), I splurged.

And so far, the best surprise is exactly what I wrote first: The Magic Mouse works with 10.4 out of the fancy smancy packaging, and it has right and left clicks by default. (Note: I think it's obvious that the Magic Mouse doesn't scroll on 10.4. It's more of a Magic Mouse there.) That's a really nice bonus for our G4 Mini, which only has two USB ports.

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