Magic Mouse Not Scrolling? 6 Fixes

The pointer glides fine, clicks work, but the page won't scroll — that split symptom is the giveaway. The Magic Mouse's scroll isn't a wheel, it's a touch sensor on the shell, read and interpreted by macOS. When scrolling dies alone, the sensor data is getting lost in software. These six fixes go from most to least likely.

1. Check the scrolling settings

Open System Settings → Mouse with the Magic Mouse connected. Confirm scrolling-related options are on — in particular Natural scrolling being toggled doesn't kill scrolling, but a third-party mouse utility can. While you're here, move the Tracking speed slider once; forcing the pane to write settings re-syncs preferences and has fixed stuck scrolling on its own.

Scroll speed itself lives elsewhere: System Settings → Accessibility → Pointer Control → Mouse & Trackpad → Mouse Options has the Scroll speed slider. If scrolling technically works but moves almost nothing, someone set this slider to the bottom.

Also confirm scrolling is actually broken rather than invisible: if pages move when you swipe but you see no scroll bars, that's the display setting in System Settings → Appearance → Show scroll bars, not a mouse fault at all.

2. Clean the touch surface

The whole top shell is the scroll sensor. A film of grime, lotion, or moisture makes it misread or ignore your finger. Turn the mouse off, wipe the top with a slightly damp lint-free cloth, dry it, and try again. In cold, dry rooms, very dry fingertips also read poorly — the same reason a phone screen sometimes ignores you.

3. Restart the Dock and the app

First check whether scrolling is dead everywhere or in one app — some apps freeze their scroll view while the rest of the system scrolls fine. Quit and reopen the suspect app.

If scrolling is dead system-wide, restart the Dock process, which owns a chunk of the gesture pipeline. It relaunches by itself in a couple of seconds:

# restart the Dock (relaunches automatically; no undo needed)
killall Dock

4. Re-pair the mouse

A degraded Bluetooth session can drop the high-frequency touch data while keeping basic pointer movement. Rebuild it:

1. Open System Settings → Bluetooth.
2. Click ⓘ next to the Magic Mouse and choose Forget This Device.
3. Flip the mouse's power switch off and on, then click Connect when it appears under Nearby Devices.

Check the battery percentage while you're in that pane — below about 10%, Magic Mouse behavior gets erratic before the mouse dies outright. Charge it and retest before blaming anything else.

5. Hunt for gesture-app conflicts

Utilities that customize mice and trackpads — scroll-direction fixers, gesture expanders, input remappers — sit between the sensor and macOS, and a crashed or misconfigured one silently eats scroll events. If you run any: quit it, test scrolling, then relaunch. If scrolling returns while it's quit, update or reconfigure that utility. The clean test is a second user account: if scrolling works there, something in your login items is the culprit.

6. Restart, update, and the hardware verdict

Restart the Mac — it rebuilds the entire input stack and resolves the cases a Dock restart doesn't. Then check System Settings → General → Software Update; scroll-related bugs have been fixed in macOS point releases.

If nothing above works, test the mouse on another Mac. Scrolling broken there too means the touch sensor itself has failed — service or replacement territory. Working fine on the other Mac points back at your machine's software; a Safe Mode boot (hold Shift on Intel; power-button startup options on Apple silicon) is the next diagnostic step.