I feel like this is a mouse which is very underrated and frankly barely even heard of, and the blame for that goes to its big brother; the Logitech MX Master, which has been pretty much been stealing its spotlight.
Both the mice are very similar in terms of features, except for the MX Master having a couple more tricks up its sleeve, like the additional horizontal scroll wheel and a bigger body with a larger thumb rest. Up until now, I had only been using the free mouse you get with a Dell laptop, with it’s 2.4 GHz receiver dongle that you plug into your laptop and forget about. It did the job, and I don’t really do anything that would require me to splurge on a better mouse, at least that’s what I thought until I used the MX Anywhere 2.
The free mouse that I had before wasn’t really a big mouse, one with a claw grip. And it wasn’t very ergonomic, at all. But I didn’t really care. It seemed to work just fine for me, until a few months ago, when the right-click just stopped working. Luckily my birthday was right around the corner, and my friends gifted me the Logitech MX Anywhere 2, which they found for a decent price on Amazon, I think for about $60, compared to the retail price of $79.99. They were deciding between this or a Logitech G402, and since I had recently upgraded to a MacBook, they thought best to stick with a wireless mouse for everyday tasks rather than a wired one for gaming.
So a couple of days later, sure enough the mouse shows up and I get right into using it. It was a completely different experience, the clicks felt more click-y, it was way smoother than the free one and lastly, there were so many options for the button mapping. I’m not joking when I say that I spent at least 2 weeks going back and forth between the settings, unable to find a permanent setting for the 5 additonal buttons.
Logitech has this neat little trick with its scroll wheel; it has 2 modes: one which your normal scroll wheel where you can feel the increments, and the other one, which you activate by pressing the wheel, turns it into this seemingly frictionless wheel, primarily for whizzing past through pages in a document, spreadsheets and other stuff that’s really long ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). The scroll wheel also has this ability to swivel to the left and right, and its function can be customised from the Logitech Options app.
There’s also this thing where you can make a button a “Gesture button”, where, while pressing it, you can do the swipe gestures that are there for trackpads, but you can customise what each swipe direction will do. So, here are my functions for the keys for any of you who care:
- The left and right swivels on the scroll wheel are to move to the different Spaces (virtual desktops) in macOS, which is more convenient than the 3-swipe to the left/right gesture on the trackpad.
- The middle button (located behind the scroll wheel) opens up messenger.com
- 1 of the 2 keys placed near the thumb is for closing a tab or just closing pretty much anything, with the keystroke assignment of Cmd+W
- The other key is a gesture button, where if you swipe up, it “looks up” the item, (say a tough word or a folder/image), swipe down takes a screenshot, swiping left takes you back and swiping right takes you forward, which is pretty helpful in going back and forth webpages.
There are a LOT more options for customising, pretty much anything that you can think up of, and honestly the whole abundance of options did grow a bit tiresome, but that’s just a very personal view. Nonetheless, it is nice to have.
The mouse pretty much works great, although there are a couple issues with it. Since I opted for using it through Bluetooth instead of the Unifying Receiver, I have had the mouse just not connect to my MacBook Air, something which was pretty annoying, and the only fix is to switch the Bluetooth on the laptop and mouse on and off, although it has been rare for the past couple of weeks. Another major issue is the sudden high latency which just makes the cursor lag and pretty much make it unusable, and this however is something that has been more frequent than the connection issue. But on the bright side the mouse has 3 different devices that it can connect to, and that comes in handy when I use my Dell laptop running Windows 10, where the settings can be tweaked as well.
So, in conclusion, the Logitech MX Anywhere 2 is a great mouse which is pretty underrated, and if either the MX Master is a tad bit expensive for you, or if you just prefer a claw grip/have small hands, the MX Anywhere 2 is a great choice, barring the few times when the latency shoots up, which I guess can only be fixed by an update of some sort from Logitech’s end, or who knows, there might just be something wrong with my laptop.
