Apple's Magic Mouse will soon benefit from Force Touch wizardry

Magic Mouse and peripherals

It looks like Apple is planning a Magic Mouse with Force Touch technology incorporated, or at least the company has filed a patent for such a peripheral.

The Force Touch will function much as it does with the trackpad that was introduced with Apple's MacBook Pro 13-inch with Retina display that debuted last spring.

In other words, wherever you press the surface of the Magic Mouse, you'll get the same uniform click with haptic feedback – feedback which replicates a click perfectly, as we noted in our review of last year's MacBook Pro 13-inch.

How hard you click will also be registered by the mouse, thereby opening up more possibilities for the UI, with different strengths of press triggering different functions – as has always been the idea with Force Touch since it was first revealed on the Apple Watch.

Trackpad trio

Both the MacBook Pro 13-inch and 15-inch had Force Touch trackpads introduced last year, and the technology also arrived on the Magic Trackpad 2 in the autumn.

It certainly seems a natural enough move for Apple to extend Force Touch to its Magic Mouse, and hopefully we'll see some compelling use cases for the technology in OS X. One of our main criticisms of the tech on last year's MacBook Pro was the fact that it seemed more of a gimmick than an actual useful feature, but Apple will doubtless be working hard to change that.

Cupertino's patent was spotted by Patently Apple and was published today, although it was initially filed in the first quarter of 2013.

TOPICS

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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