There’s a Surprising Catch to Apple’s New ‘Magic’ USB-C Accessories
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A keyboard is a keyboard, right? So, one would expect that Apple’s new USB-C Magic Keyboards would work just as well with your Mac as their Lightning-equipped predecessors did. Sadly, it seems that not all Mac keyboards are created equal.
As MacRumors reported yesterday, Apple’s new USB-C Magic Keyboards, Magic Trackpad, and Magic Mouse all require macOS Sequoia 15.1. If you’re running an older version of macOS, you’ll need to update to that to use them properly.
Folks using macOS Sonoma and Ventura, both of which are still otherwise supported by Apple, have reported that the keyboards aren’t fully functional when paired with those older versions of macOS. The built-in Touch ID sensor may involve more sophisticated security protocols, but many folks have reported the function keys don’t work either. In some cases, they’re also being mysteriously recognized as older devices.
The same holds true for the new Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, which appear to older versions of macOS as a generic mouse. This results in the Trackpad barely working at all, while the Magic Mouse seems to lack all touch and swipe gestures on the top surface — even the most basic ones like scrolling.
To add insult to injury, developers running the first macOS 15.2 beta have reported similar problems. Apple will presumably address this in a future beta, but we’ll have to wait and see whether it will release compatibility updates for macOS Sonoma and Ventura, as many older Macs can’t be updated to Sequoia. The macOS Sonoma 14.7.1 and macOS Ventura 13.7.1 security patches released earlier this week don’t solve the problem.
To add to the confusion, the System Requirements for each of the new accessories on Apple’s Store pages list a “Bluetooth-enabled Mac with OS X 10.11 or later” for the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad or a “Mac with Apple silicon using macOS 11.4 or later” for the Magic Keyboards. On the other hand, the product boxes for all the accessories say: “Requires Mac with Apple silicon using the latest version of macOS.”
While the cynical take is that Apple has locked these accessories to the latest version of Sequoia, it’s more likely something as simple as a driver and device identifier issue — something that should be eerily familiar to anyone who has ever worked with Device Manager on Windows. You can install a new keyboard with specialized features on a Windows PC, but you won’t be able to use any of those extended capabilities until you install the proper drivers.
As USB-C devices, the Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad will all have different device identifiers from their Lightning predecessors — IDs that won’t match the existing drivers in older versions of macOS. There’s no reason to believe the internal hardware has changed beyond the switch to a USB-C port, so there’s no reason the existing drivers shouldn’t work — as long as the Mac knows to use them.
In a Windows world, you’d just hit up the manufacturer’s website and download the proper drivers, but that’s not how things work with Apple. However, if it’s truly just a matter of matching up the IDs, then it should be easy for Apple to fix, even if that means making a separate update available. If Apple isn’t willing to do this, it probably won’t be long before someone else figures out how to dig into the innards of macOS and put the pieces together to match everything up.
