Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category
A couple months ago I got myself a brand new Magic Mouse. So far I’ve been using it together with BetterTouchTool and overall experience has been really positive. However, it didn’t take that long, until I noticed some connectivity issues. Both my iMac and MacBookPro suddenly lost connection with the Magic Mouse and it took a couple seconds (sometimes even more than 10 seconds!), before the mouse reconnected and started to work again. As you can imagine, this was very annoying!
I fired up google and tried to look for some answers. Well, at least I was not alone. Many others described the same or similar issues, but there was no official response from Apple.
I tried various “solutions”, like cleaning the cache, setting Bluetooth status to hidden instead of visible, etc… Nothing really helped. One day, I had the chance to try a brand new Magic Mouse. This one didn’t have any connectivity issues and so I wanted to find out, whether mine had some sort of hardware issue and I had to send it back to Apple.
First thing I did, was replacing the batteries inside the new Magic Mouse with batteries from mine. And what happened? Bingo, Jackpot, Yeah 
Connectivity issues! So, in my case it had to be the batteries. But why? I bought an expensive set, not some no name product. What was wrong with them?
Well, the batteries were alright, but the positive pole was slightly shorter. Combined with the design of the Magic Mouse and how the poles make contact inside, I believe this was the root of my connectivity issues.
Take a look at the image below:
See the difference? Battery on the left never gave me any trouble, due to its slightly bigger positive pole.
So, what can one do now? Well, actually there are two possible solutions.
1) When buying your new batteries, make sure that they got this slightly bigger positive pole.
2) Use some kitchen foil. Take a look at image below:
Cut a little piece of kitchen foil and fold it two or three times. Make sure that it’s only slightly bigger than the positive pole of your battery. Create one of these little helpers for each battery. Now put them on top of your batteries and insert them into your Magic Mouse as usual. This worked great for me and so far my Magic Mouse hasn’t lost its connection once!
Hope, this information will be helpful to someone out there
Oh, the above workaround comes without limit or warranty and please try at your own risk.
Update: I’ve tried the above workaround for about 2 weeks now and there hasn’t been a single dropped connection!
Update 2: Works still great and it has been 5 months
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