Check your Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, keyboard battery

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Check your Magic Mouse, keyboard, Magic Trackpad battery

26 August 2010 6,439 views 6 Comments

I buy and sell used Macs. The other night I was pitching an Aluminum 20-inch iMac to a customer as it booted up and just as I said the words, “It runs perfect,” a message popped up on the screen saying the batteries in the Bluetooth Apple Wireless Keyboard were almost dead.

Nevertheless, dude bought the iMac for my asking price, so all was well. However, I vowed to not let that happen again, which left me wondering how to check the battery status of an Apple Mighty Mouse, wireless keyboard or Magic Trackpad? As a person who doesn’t use wireless input devices, I didn’t know — Bluetooth is always turned off on my Macs.

Well, if you’ve chosen to display Bluetooth status in the menubar, then the low hanging fruit is just to click on that icon and select the item you want to learn more about.

A second more manual way of finding this info is to open System Preferences and click on Mouse. At the bottom left corner of that window, there’s a simple “Battery Level” graphic and percent left display.

Likewise, for the keyboard, or Magic Trackpad, open System Preferences and click on Keyboard (or Magic Trackpad). At the bottom left corner of the window that opens there’s a simple “Battery Level” graphic and percent left display.

Alternately, check out Markus Weimar’s Battery Level, a Dashboard Widget that displays battery level information for Apple’s trackpad, mouse and keyboard products, which can save a lot of clicks and turn an otherwise simple need to know into a neurotic twitch…

What’s your take?

6 Comments »

Gary said:

Or, you could just go to the Bluetooth icon in the menu bar, scroll to the device and find the battery level in the sub-menu.

# 26 August 2010 at 11:49 am

Neil Anderson said:

In System Preferences click on Bluetooth, then click the checkbox for “Show bluetooth status in menu bar.” You can then check your devices’ battery level from the menu bar.

# 26 August 2010 at 12:11 pm

Thib said:

Here’s what I think:

There’s a much easier way to check the battery status of all Apple wireless and battery operated products. From the menu, select the bluetooth menulet icon. From there, select whatever device you want to find out its battery charge. It’ll display on the menu how much charge is left.

If the bluetooth icon is not visible, you need to make it visible. The way to do that is:

Apple > System Preferences > Bluetooth

Then,
from the bluetooth menu, select ” Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar”.

There, all done.

# 26 August 2010 at 12:17 pm

John said:

Mighty Monitor is a dashboard widget that displays the battery status of the Magic Trackpad (as well as the magic/mighty mouse, and apple keyboards).

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/mightymonitor.html

# 20 September 2010 at 11:32 am

Scott said:

Thanks, John, for the link to the Mighty Monitor. Done. Fastest battery level check. Previously, I had put the Mouse Preferences Pane on the dock, so one click gave me the battery level via the Mouse pref pane. This is better, right there on dashboard. Plus, I can always double-check on the Bluetooth menulet.

# 13 October 2010 at 1:43 pm