Apple surprise us this morning when they release the new iPad Pro, new MacBook Air, and new Mac Mini. They also release a new accessory for the iPad Pro, the new Magic Keyboard.

With that new accessory comes the long awaited full mouse support.

What’s it like?

In this first-impression, I will be using the iPad Pro 10.5” running iPadOS 13.4 with a Logitech MX Master 2S and a Logitech K380 keyboard.

Once upgraded, you can connect to any Bluetooth mouse from your Bluetooth setting, just like any other Bluetooth accessories.

Unlike previous version of iPadOS 13, the new cursor is much smaller and smarter. It will actually adapt and change appearance based on where it is on the screen.

You can select texts just like you normally do on a computer. Right click will usually bring up the contextual menu or activate Haptic Touch functions.

Moving the cursor to the bottom of the screen quickly bring up the Dock.

Clicking on the left side of the status bar bring down the Notification Center.

Clicking on the right side activate Control Center.

Reduce Pointer Animations

One thing that annoy me right away is how the cursor sort of “snap” to buttons and screen elements (see the animation below). This look really at first, but become irritating to use very fast.

First off, your cursor disappear when this happen.

Second, it feels like the cursor “jumps” to the buttons. This combined with the fact that the cursor is hidden, make it really easy to lost track of where the cursor is.

These make it really hard to preciously control the cursor. It is even more problematic for larger icons/buttons since it take longer for the cursor to “escape” the icons’ hold.

Though, I only have a few hours with the new OS so I am not sure if this is something I will get used to.

Luckily, I don’t need to find out. There is actually an option to disable this behavior. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Pointer Control (Only visible while a mouse is connected) and turn off Pointer Animations.

This makes the cursor act much like what you would have on a computer.

Other Quirks

Going Home

Another little quirk with this new mouse support is the fact that there is no way to go Home with the mouse, unless you have the newer iPad Pro models that have Face ID (and no home button).

You can click on the left side of the status bar to get to Control Center, and click on the left (the clock) to get to Notification Center. To go home, you would click on the Home Bar at the bottom and it will take you home. However, older or non-Pro iPads that still have Touch-ID doesn’t have this Home Bar at the bottom. The best way I found to go home is to set a custom button on my mouse to act as a home button, press shortcut keys on a keyboard, or just use the physical Home button. There might be other way to go home but I have not figure that out yet. Please, let me know in the comment if you know how to go home with a mouse on a non-Pro iPad.

Mouse and On-Screen Keyboard

The last mildly annoying thing was the fact that my mouse (the Logitech MX Master 2S) also have custom buttons on it, which a lot of Bluetooth mice do nowadays. These buttons seem to be recognized by the OS to be some kind of keyboard. Now, here is the problem, because the OS thought there is also a keyboard being attached to it, it refuses to show the on-screen keyboard while this mouse is connected to it!

This means that I can’t type while a mouse is connected, unless I also have an external keyboard connected to the iPad at the same time!

This is something that should be easily fixable with a software update. Add a button to show/hide the on-screen keyboard like what we have on Windows 10, for example. I really hope Apple would fix this in the next OS update.

TeamViewer

As of March 25, 2020, TeamViewer has not been updated to support the mouse feature yet. Things like scrolling with the scroll-wheel still doesn’t work.

On Windows, clicking and selecting items do work quite well. Much better than with touch alone. On macOS though, the click actions is extremely finicky and hard to get right. Dragging work just fine, but single click rarely seems to work. This seems like a TeamViewer on macOS issues though, not the iPad itself. Hopefully, this is something that will get fixed soon.

It would be a dream to have your powerful computer running at home and remote access in to do your work from an iPad, anywhere in the world. I am positive that, once the company update their application to support mouse, this will be an amazing setup to use!

Conclusion

My first impression with this new mouse support for the iPad is still somewhat of a mixed experience. I feel like there are still quite a bit of quirk here and there that will need to be patched out for this to be truly useful. For a lot of people, I don’t think this is a must. Unless you are doing a lot of things that require a mouse, you won’t gain much by having this kind of mouse support (surely, most people don’t go back and forth to edit their emails that often to required a mouse). For those that do a lot of task that need a mouse (e.g. video editing, editing long and complex documents), I still think it is better to just get a laptop.

Nevertheless, I still think this is definitely a step in the right direction for iPads and I’m really excited to see what to come.