Home > News

iOS 13 May Allow You to Add a Mouse Through USB-C to iPad Pro to Mimic Laptop

By Laura Tucker
News Ipad Pro Usb C Mouse Featured

There’s been discussion for several years that Apple is interested in eliminating desktops and laptops and replacing them with iPads. There’s even been a trend of the company combining macOS and iOS to get closer to that ideal.

However, the company consistently says that isn’t the direction they are headed. However, a report suggests Apple is working on adding the ability to add a mouse or trackpad to an iPad Pro through USB-C in the upcoming iOS 13. With the addition of a Bluetooth keyboard, this would give the user a more complete laptop experience.

Adding Mouse Capability to iPad Pro

The premium tablet line of the iPad Pros has long been considered to be a possible replacement of the MacBook Pro, but it has its detractors. Their main complaints are that there’s no mouse or trackpad, the onboard keyboard is too difficult to work with, and the mobile software isn’t good enough to do anything serious with it.

But MacStories editor Federico Viticci raised the possibility on a podcast of adding mouse support to the iPad Pro lineup now that the 2018 models have USB-C support.

Some suggest it could be added as a feature with AssistiveTouch accessibility. AppleInsider found that that it’s already a possibility to have a cursor when working in iOS when it’s used with the right hardware.

Viticci’s sources believe a USB-C mouse could be used similarly in the future and that it could plug directly into the USB-C port on the iPad Pro.

News Ipad Pro Usb C Mouse Keyboard

Developer Steve Troughton-Smith gave credibility to this thought when he tweeted, “If you missed last week’s @_connectedfm, @viticci had a pretty interesting scoop that he’d been sitting on re mouse support coming to iPad as an accessibility feature. As far as I’m aware, that ‘is’ indeed in the works.”

He added, “I feel like every pro user will turn that on, day one,” and added a laughing-while-crying emoji.

AppleInsider adds that if this is indeed in the works with Apple that the company wouldn’t stop with just USB-C connectivity. Why not utilize Bluetooth connectivity? After all, this is how iPads connect to a keyboard. And if that’s the case, the feature wouldn’t be limited to iPad Pros.

User Acceptability

Much of this depends on that two-fold factor between Apple and user. Users have to desire this feature, and Apple has to recognize that they do and fulfill that need.

I will say I have been using iPads since the iPad 2 in 2011. Since the first few days of working on it, it became my main machine. I used my Mac less and less, and now I haven’t even touched it in at least six months.

I started using an iPad Pro for the first time a few months back. For the most part, I can do much of what I did before on the standard iPad line. I could never do what I do without a keyboard, but I can’t see how a mouse or trackpad would improve anything for me. One of the reasons I prefer the iPad is because of the touchscreen experience rather than mouse. I also enjoy iOS more than macOS.

What do you think of the possibility of running a mouse with USB-C on an iPad Pro? Would that be a game-changer for you? Add your thoughts to the comments section below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.