Having used the iPad with a mouse and now a trackpad for a while, I've got to say I don't like the mouse cursor turning into the button. It feels like the cursor gets "trapped" in the button, and often I can lose track of which button has focus since the hint can be rather subtle on some buttons.
Mostly, I just want a normal mouse cursor.
Of course, Apple isn't designing for a user like me, though, I'm really not sure what user they've designed this mouse cursor for.
It is interesting how Apple's accessibility menu is growing to control so many aspects of UI. I still have this notion that "accessibility" are mostly settings for people with special needs, not with different UI preferences
I'm not sure if it's deliberate or not, but it seems like a subtle way of reducing the stigma of standing out when needing accessible accommodations to work effectively with computers. Keeping tweaks to UI behaviors to accommodate ways folks have to work along side with ways folks like to work blends them all together.
It's not "political", it's devs realizing that real humans have different interface needs. We're all "disabled" from the point of view of a computer: computers have no need for silly mouse and keyboard and monitor for getting work done.
It's the same on Android and Windows 10. Some of my favorite settings on both systems are hidden away in the Accessibility (Android) or Ease of Access (Windows) panels.
In particular, each system has a setting to turn off animations for a calmer experience.
On Windows you can make the text cursor thicker so it's easier to see on a high-DPI display, and select a black mouse pointer instead of the default white.
There are a bunch more - worth a look around even if you don't think you have any accessibility needs.
I think this perhaps comes from the decades-long use of “accessibility” as euphemism for “application preference settings needed by handicapped people”. It never really meant “accessibility” alone without the euphemistic baggage.
It seems to me that the gradient from “application state” to “color scheme/theme” to “preferences” to “accessibility” is a continuous one, and we are still treating it from a mental model standpoint as discrete buckets.
Now it’s back to being used in the literal meaning of the term, which, as you pointed out, is basis for confusion. This is one reason why I try hard to avoid euphemism in general; imprecision that results in context-specific definition drift makes for needlessly messy communication.
I didn't bother looking for settings, and sure enough, you can switch off "Pointer Animations" and now my cursor isn't getting "trapped" all over the place.
Also saying Apple reinvented the cursor is a bit much. Highlighting elements, snapping, and changing the cursor weren't just invented. The author really bought into Apple's marketing here.
I feel like the quality of TechCrunch has really gone down as a whole over the years, and this article is a great example. It is essentially a fluff and marketing piece for Apple that can be summarised in three dotpoints:
* Apple invented the cursor (untrue)
* On iPad, the cursor is a round circle
* They bought over the same Apple TV effect on iPad
Most of the words and sentences in this article are meaningless, and if there's anything reading this has made me feel, it's that I'll never subscribe to their subscription service.
Care to share a couple examples of the meaningless sentences in this piece? I found it more interesting and engaging than the Wired piece, precisely because it dived deeper into the theory behind the interaction design choices that Apple made here.
> Honestly, the thinking could have stopped there and that would have been perfectly adequate. A rough finger facsimile as pointer. But the concept is pushed further. As you approach an interactive element, the circle reaches out, smoothly touching then embracing and encapsulating the button.
> The idea of variable cursor velocity is pushed further here too. When you’re close to an object on the screen, it changes its rate of travel to get where you want to go quicker, but it does it contextually, rather than linearly, the way that macOS or Windows does.
Could be shortened significantly. The passage repeats each point twice, including the main point, and is mostly flowery language that doesn’t add anything.
> The thinking could have stopped there, but instead of being a rough finger facsimile, the circle accelerates, then reaches out to elements as you approach them, embracing and encapsulating the button. This is unlike macOS and Windows, which vary velocity linearly.
The entire article is like this. I think the author was padding for word count or seo or something. I didn’t read the wired piece.
I don't read much of this language as "flowery" at all, and I think removing almost any of the words that you're decrying as not adding anything change the meaning and tone.
For example, your rewritten version is not an accurate representation of what the author was trying to convey, and mangles the two separate points into one. The contextual acceleration the author is describing is not the same thing as the circle "reaching out" as it approaches buttons.
> Unlike the text entry models of before, which placed character after character in a facsimile of a typewriter, this was a tether that connected us, embryonic, to the aleph.
They never say that Apple invented the cursor. What they do say is that Apple brought the mouse-controlled cursor to the mass market, which is true. They are actually careful to explain its origins at Xerox PARC, and they even show a video from that time.
I lived with a journalist for a while. Basically it can be summed up as "now they pay freelancers to write for basically nothing except ~exposure~". Typically there's a word count and a monthly article minimum, and if you don't hit your monthly minimum you get nothing for any of the articles you wrote that month. Like just $0 for all your work. This isn't just blogs like TC BTW, my roomate worked for Forbes and I think Bloomberg, but the second one might have been a real job, idk. Forbes was definatly freelance, though. And this was business news, not some BS side column. If you are following the industry he wrote about closely, there's a good chance you have read at least one of his articles
Fwiw the writers (at least, the one I knew) hate it too because it floods the job market with ultra low paid competition, and since it's "just the way things are", a lot of those underpaid people are very talented and are glad to accept very little pay
Forbes is one of the saddest cases. Under Malcolm Forbes the biweekly print magazine was arguably the real class of the business periodicals. But, at some point, the online version just sold its soul for page views with all the "influencer" blogs, many of them written by people with conflicts of interest a mile long. Overall, their "native advertising" was/is as egregious as anyone's.
And that's not even getting into just how annoying it is to try to read anything on Forbes because of all the pop-ups etc.
Yeah, it's fairly simple to crudely replicate the effect in CSS. It gets rid of the possibility that your cursor is blocking a portion of the button label, but creates uncertainty in the position of the cursor -- jiggling the mouse lightly won't let you locate it anymore. What iPadOS 'invented' was to transition the effect in a smoother and snappier way.
> Of course, Apple isn't designing for a user like me, though, I'm really not sure what user they've designed this mouse cursor for.
This is a question I've asked myself way too many times in relation to Apple hardware these last few years. Mostly when I had to deal with needless dongles.
The vast majority of users rarely if ever plug in peripherals that can't have an adaptor permanently attached. Why pay size, weight, complexity, fragility for sometht users don't need?
I'd like to see some source for this nonsense - especially since competitors somehow manage to still put USB-A and HDMI ports on similarly sized laptops.
E.g. I have a Razer laptop which has all the build quality and properties of a MacBook... except that they somehow managed to do the impossible: install 2x USB-C and 2x USB-A. How would have thought something like that is possible?!
Can’t provide a source, but my mother-in-law works as a secretary at a school. Uses her computer 8 hours a day, every day. She has a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and a USB-C dock that her monitor is plugged into. That’s all she ever has to use at work. At home she has multiple external hard drives with photos and videos on them, these all have USB-C cables, making the USB-A requirement a non-issue, really. She’s never complained about nor missed a port.
She used to have a thicker HP with all the ports, but this one was still plugged into a dock at work, as that was simply the easiest thing to do.
For her, her daily life has not changed at all going from all the ports to two USB-C.
They could solve this, and cater to both types of audience by focusing on the button, and also showing the outline of the cursor with more transparency as well.
Yeah, it sucks for power users. It's a simplification because you don’t have pointer + data model, you only have the latter + visual highlight. But no longer the power of having a responsive pointer under exclusive user control. Dumbed down.
The Surface is horrible as a touch device because of Windows. Parts of the Windows interface is still not touch friendly not to mention Windows itself is power and resource intensive and runs horrible on low power devices.
Speaking of low power devices, depending on Intel for a device that needs to be both high performance and power efficient is a non starter.
Even though I’m almost all in on the Apple ecosystem. I still use Windows PCs mostly. This isn’t an anti-Windows screed. It’s just a horrible touch screen operating system.
Maybe my statement is wrong. I haven't used it much yet, maybe it IS more usable. I certainly appreciate the thought and design work that went into making this new cursor, something that is sorely missing from a lot of software these days.
This article uses a number of enormous GIFs instead of videos. Please don’t ever do that. They’re drastically wasteful of bandwidth (16MB should have been much less), ignore the user’s “don’t autoplay videos” preference, yield lower quality results, and load extremely badly.
Techcrunch is my least favorite site for a while now. I hate their bad cookie wall, their bad stories and their bad behavior of hijacking the back button.
And yet as we speak they have 2 article's on HN's front page, totaling 1100+ votes. So they probably have the "perfect" amount of awfulness: people know about it and complain, yet they still click.
Yeah, you have to long press on the back button and then select the previous site from the history dropdown. I hate sites like this, and actively avoid them
This has been annoying me too. I’ll definitely be avoiding TechCrunch now.
What I don’t understand is, what exactly are they trying to do? Is this just a bug, and it’s only supposed to hijack the back button once? I can see (reluctantly) how a single hijack might nudge users to stick around longer, but surely there’s no upside to infinite hijacking...?
> what exactly are they trying to do? Is this just a bug
It might be important for SEO:
It assesses the number of people who leave your page by hitting the back button to return to the search listing page. If Google sends 1,000 people to one of your web pages and each of those 1,000 people hit the back button within a few seconds, it tells Google your web page isn’t relevant.
I've seen this proliferate over the last couple months. What gives? It totally breaks the reading experience and by reflex at this point I move my mouse up to the "reader view" icon on Firefox, ready to fire a click so I can read something without being visually accosted on the screen.
What makes me sad is that I know how to do this, but my parents don't. So they put up with an experience of the internet that's totally degraded.
uBlock Origin offers just that. I am sure you are aware, but perhaps others reading your comment and agreeing with it might not be.
It is great for mobile (Firefox), because you can set the "large media element" threshold to something tiny and thus get a mostly text-only web that is very fast.
Normal videos are playable by free browsers without DRM. <video> with mp4/etc. target (of course you could use a free codec like theora/vp9/av1+ogg/opus instead of h264+mp3 or whatever is in that mp4, but then it'll only work on literally everything except Apple devices... Sigh).
I've been using a mouse on my 2016 iPad 9.7" iPad for a few days now. Here are my thoughts:
- Anything related to selecting or copying text is improved, including web browsing.
- Sometimes right click brings up context menus and sometimes 'long left click' brings up context menus. Sometimes both work but with different options.
- I would like to change the cursor to an arrow pointer.
- I would like to change the scrolling direction (it's the opposite of Windows).
- Scrolling doesn't feel smooth, many people report different scrolling issues.
- You can assign different actions to different mouse buttons, this has made multitasking more efficient for me.
It's the "natural" direction on a touchscreen, where you're literally acting via a fixed viewport while dragging/flicking the content (i.e. the actual "scroll").
The other direction is more natural when you're using something like a mousewheel or a touchpad scrolling area, since that renders it quite "natural" to think about dragging the viewport, or a representation thereof such as the scrollbar handle. Dragging the "handle" downwards on a mouse or touchpad is also more ergonomic, so it's better to match it with the common direction of scrolling.
I think it's worth noting that "natural scrolling" was only a thing once iPhones and iPads came out. The reasoning was that we were already in a cognitive dissonance when switching between touch interfaces and mouse interfaces. As more and more of the interaction with Apple became touch (or touchpad -- the Magic Trackpad came out around the same time), the original direction of scrolling stopping making sense. When you aren't moving an object with your fingers, it matters less which direction you move. When you start directly interacting with objects, the "natural" scrolling direction makes more sense.
That said, it took me a few years before I ended up switching. Unchecking the scroll direction checkbox was the first thing I used to do on a Mac. Now, I'm quite happy with the natural direction.
It’s the same thing with computer games and what you started on. I have to invert the y-axis on the look stick on every game I play, because I grew up in the 80s with joysticks and flight sims. Pushing up on the stick to look up is semantically obvious, but completely the opposite of pushing forwards on a flight-control style joystick that tilts the plane down.
Acrobat reader didn’t invent the hand tool. Pretty sure there were Mac apps on the original Macintosh in 1984 with a hand tool that worked the same way.
You're getting weirdly extreme. I bet most Macbook users have used Windows before and preferred to just get used to the suddenly inverted scrolling behavior on the Macbook rather than change it to what they were familiar with on Windows.
I vastly prefer "natural scrolling" now. It was awkward for about 10min. Now when I use someone's laptop that scrolls in the opposite direction, it's jarring to see the content move in a direction different than my fingers.
You're speaking from the comfort of familiarity just like anyone else is, though I can't believe anyone feels so strongly about default scroll direction. Why let something so stupid annoy you?
The implicit opposite of natural is unnatural, which implies some sort of deviance from normal. Should we call all right-handed people "natural" and left-handed people something else?
Convention since far back as I can remember('90s) was "invert", as to why Apple decided to buck this trend, your guess is as good as mine.
I suppose it's somewhat cheeky. Like it has a cheekiness rating of 0.0001 instead of 0.0. But I really cannot relate to the sort of person who cares.
At the same time, giving it a name is useful.
"Do you have natural scrolling on or off?" vs "So, which direction does the content scroll when you move two fingers down on your trackpad? No, I mean, when you're touching the trackpad with two fingers and you move them towards you, does the page go up or down? Oh, by up, I mean that the text actually is going down but you're moving towards the top of the website."
> I bet most Macbook users have used Windows before and preferred to just get used to the suddenly inverted scrolling behavior on the Macbook rather than change it to what they were familiar with on Windows.
That's a pretty big generalization. I, for one, prefer things to be consistent on both my windows and mac machines.
Of course it's a generalisation. That should be clear enough by the words "I bet most".
You also missed the point of the comment, which was to state why natural scrolling doesn't rile up Mac users so much as Windows users — by now, the majority of us are used to it.
When you are using a trackpad, it IS natural to scroll that way. Haven't used a mouse in years (except when setting up Linux for GPU compute, and it was a pita).
Regarding the scrolling, is it maybe the case that when touching the screen, iOS can “prepare” for a scrolling event by preloading stuff around the viewport?
Whereas a cursor does not signal “scrolling intent” as good: it can be sort of anywhere (it can be “left behind” while you are reading som text) and is always on screen as opposed to your finger.
The inverted scrolling direction is now standard on Windows precision touchpads I believe, as well as Macs (i.e. two fingers upwards scrolls the page downwards).
I don’t think you will ever be able to change the cursor to an arrow pointer because Apple is more interested in being different than they are interested in being useful.
This became very clear to me when I realized that you have not ever been able to even change the color of the pointer in macOS, nevermind the shape. I wanted it to be white so it would stand out more. Apple doesn’t care - they are too busy projecting style to care about users petty practical needs.
I only recently found out I could set the color of the pointer in Windows 10. I set it to a bright turquoise/cyan which makes it stick out much better than it used to.
In Windows 9x one had themes to change colors and mouse cursors, I even had a Star Trek Voyager theme where the pointer was the ship, angled so it looks like a pointer.
It seems this feature is still in Windows 7, but no longer in Windows 10.
Don't think there was ever a setting for changing color and cursor shape native in macOS (though size and such is in Accessibility), but it's always been possible by digging into the system a bit (just like all the icons are simply .icns bundles in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ and can be easily replaced to change the mediocre current icons with better ones). There have long since been many 3rd party utilities to make it easier/more automated, though some of them seem to have gotten abandoned. Here's an open source one called Mousecape if you're curious for example, but you have to fork it and remove the sparkle framework to make it work in 10.15:
There's various commercial pointer modification utilities, as well as simpler highlighter-effect ones like Mouseposé and Pinpoint.
Theming on macOS was a big awesome thing at one point, kind of too bad it seems to have fallen away a bit (in part because Apple's new security efforts have made it ever more work). At least it's still doable though.
Unrelated to the post, but related to TechCrunch: is there a way for me to prevent them from hijacking my back button? There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking back to go to my previous page, only to be redirected to the same exact page I already am on.
Over time techcrunch has become so bloated and that page so full of ads that I stopped going there altogether. On top of that they started hijacking the back button too, I stopped clicking on techcrunch links too. I would rather guess what they said from the comments here than clicking on that link.
I stop going to sites which break the back button. When TechCrunch made the design change, I stopped visiting them all together. That along with the bloated auto-scroll to next story killed the site for me.
"The iPad is the most versatile computer that Apple makes" ??
Bro, I can't even run extensions in my browser. Not to mention the other things you can only do on a real computer. It brings nothing except for touch, but loses a lot of things.
The nice thing about the "linear" spaces on MacOS and Windows is that in the vast majority of cases there's a 1:1 mapping between the pixels on the screen and the UI elements.
What makes me nervous is when they start making the pointer space non-linear. Is there a risk that you just can't get the cursor to activate a part of the screen because it keeps getting sucked into a nearby control? Or is the pointer space just a reversibly-warped version of the screen space?
The 'pointer magnetism' in iPadOS has two different effects.
The main effect doesn't change pointer movement: Most controls on iPadOS are bigger than they look, because fingers. With no adaptation, the cursor would be hovering over controls when it looks like it's 24px away from them.
To avoid this, controls move toward the cursor when hovered, depending on how far away the cursor is from their centre. On any given frame, if the cursor is within a control's actual bounds, the control will visually overlap the cursor's current position.
The second thing does affect pointer movement: If you quickly swipe in a single direction, and the cursor lands on the edge of a control, effect #1 still happens on the approach, but the element bounces back to its resting location, and the cursor goes with it.
This seems to work well in practice. It doesn't change anything while your finger is moving, it doesn't affect any 'precise' motions, and it can't lead to your swipe landing on a different element.
Most likely the Human Interface Guidelines that Apple enforces for all of their software is a major enabler for this, as it mandates minimum touch areas and spacing that should eliminate that type of issues. No other platform has as much native UI adoption - used to be the case for Mac too until Electron and others came along.
Do minor platforms count? I suspect Sailfish has higher native UI adoption. IIRC back when I had a Sailfish phone, all the apps I used including the third-party ones used the same standard UI elements.
They probably meant out of the platforms Apple competes with. Presumably I could find a platform with, say, 12 users and only 1 non-native app, and if that app followed native UI guidelines I could say it has 100% native UI adoption and thus the “highest” out of every platform ever, but that is a useless statement.
I have one of the new Magic Keyboards in front of me now.
I had the same reservations as you before trying it out (and it’s a little hard to tell because all I have to rely on is my meat brain’s interpretation), but it feels like the cursor still moves in linear space. It’s just that whilst it’s over a button (or other control) that the cursor disappears and the selection feels glued to the control for the duration it passes over.
Mouse acceleration is one of the things I always turn off on a clean install, precisely because of that nonlinearity. When I have to use others' systems who do have it on, I find myself always overshooting with the cursor.
My only gripe with the smart keyboard is the touchpad uses a mechanical button for clicking. It feels clunky compared to the crispness of the last few mbp generations which use a haptic electromechanical component to (perfectly) simulate a click feel.
Funny thing about haptic click is how jarring it is if it's off, like pressing your iphone's home button before you realize it lost its charge. It really feels super-dead.
It used to be terrible on old non-mac machines (probably still is), but Apple's trackpad has been good enough for tap to click to be preferable since at least 2014, maybe earlier.
Another lesser known feature I think is great is three finger drag. This lets you move a window by just using three fingers on the menu bar of that window. It used to be an easy to find setting, but they've since buried it in trackpad accessibility settings for some reason. It's still one of the first things I enable on a new machine.
That's been a feature since at least Windows XP (also you could tap the GHB nipple/TouchStick)... so it was really confusing when laptops started having clicky touchpads :D
There's not enough space. The iPhone 7 Taptic Engine (the only one I could find dimensions for on short notice) was .4 inches on it's smallest dimension. The new Magic Keyboard is .25 inches thick. I don't think it's worth doubling the thickness of the keyboard portion for the improvement the haptic version might give, it already takes the super thin iPad and basically doubles both it's thickness and weight.
I never understood that. Why do you need a skeuomorphic click? You don't trust that tapping works? Whenever I set up a new phone it's a mad dash to disable the haptic tap feedback before I go crazy.
Although like many I probably would prefer a traditional cursor, I appreciate that people are exploring the possibilities of the space. I hate change for its own sake. But there are so many choices that go into graphical user interface design. Even if we've hit a local maxima, I don't think we've hit on the best paradigm. We've only been at this for ~60 years or so. Not to mention the personal preference that goes into this. Keep exploring! Keep experimenting! (Just please don't force me to change how I use my computer against my will.)
I don't think this (meaning the cursor) is "reinventing" anything, it's actually a work around because the iOS UX doesn't have good non-touch affordances. It will be dumbed down over time, and apparently you can turn it off.
Android devices, with a mouse or trackpad connected (e.g., Asus Transformer series), have shown an alpha-blended disc instead of an arrow pointer since forever ago, so not even that bit is an Apple innovation.
I just have to chime in on this. While I don't use the mouse with an iPad on a daily basis, I have found a new use for it yesterday.
Once every <insert-some-time-frame> I start missing games and decide to play something. I have a dedicated relatively powerful PC for that. What I have recently found out is that I can play XCOM2 on my PC through my iPad with Steam link. The experience was good enough out of the box but the way the cursor was controlled through an iPad screen felt a bit out of place.
Yesterday, I suddenly realized that I can use a Bluetooth mouse with my iPad and holy crap, the experience is like playing on the PC but I am not attached to the desk! There is only one minor issue of not being able to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen without triggering the applications bar, but this was not too annoying.
Not sure how important this is to anyone, but I was amazed that I could do this.
Oh my! This is amazing! It is exactly what I need to fulfill the picture!
To those, who can't or don't want to watch the video: you can configure iPad to lock you in a single app and unlock with either biometric or pin entry. This is available in the accessibility settings.
I haven't played XCOM 2, but the 2012 XCOM had controller support. If you have an Xbox One, PS4, or one of the older MFi controllers paired with your iPad, the Steam Link app can pass those controller inputs through to the running game.
Aside from the "drag past the bottom of the screen to go home" issue, I find the mouse support has worked really well in games that have an on-screen cursor (I've tested with SimCity 4, Disco Elysium, and Factorio). It doesn't work at all in games that expect to fully capture the cursor (usually to control a camera perspective, so most first person or action games).
Breathlessly worded and everything as well, I mean, nobody in tech would genuinely describe a fucking cursor on screen as "This stir fry of path prediction, animation, physics and fun seasoning is all cooked into a dish that does its best to replicate the feel of something we do without thinking: reaching out and touching something directly." That's lifted straight out of an Apple ad. Unapologetically plastic.
The new cursor is like being handed a jumbo marker when you are used to a fine point pen. I've been using iPads since the second one came out and I think Apple is just as confused about making a mobile interface into a desktop as Microsoft has been making a desktop interface into mobile. The iPad has never been more powerful, confusing and unintuitive.
It's sad that this is a hidden option; I can't imagine using a capacitive touchscreen that didn't do this. The instant feedback on an input channel as fiddly as that is simply invaluable.
Link redirects me to `guce.advertising.com`, which my adblock blocks. If I unblock it, it redirects to yahoo, where I have to agree with YAHOO's terms of use, and only after agreeing I'm taken to techcrunch's home page.
You’ve got a point here about the complexity of the web or maybe advertising models, but it’s hard to criticize usability when you have installed a browser plugin that breaks it. Use the thing or don’t, but don’t complain when your own reassembly of the product doesn’t work.
The web became an unusable place when people who wrote for print media and had mortgages to pay started putting their content online. People wanted to read their stuff, and they wanted money, but people wouldn't pay them directly to read their stuff. So they got sponsors who pay them to write the articles, and those sponsors want you to look at ads.
Slightly off-topic but I glad that the article mentions "Mother of all demos" [1]
I watched this for the first time last year and I was shocked - Douglas Engelbart demonstrated what happens after 50 years. The mouse is the least amazing one but the demo featured real-time video conferencing and Google Docs-like real-time word editor with shared mouse pointers.
It is hard to believe it's 1968 and he actually implemented them 50 years ahead.
I haven't tried the mouse/trackpad on the ipad, but it looks really fun to use. Kind remind me of how much fun, simply scrolling on the iPhone was, back when it was released.
I am not, however, investing over 1.000 USD just to play with it. Has anyone build a demo I can play with from a laptop?
Also, I wish the bubble would deform when entering and exiting an icon.
I've been using a BT keyboard & mouse (Logitech Keys & MX Master 3) with my iPad since they announced the proper mouse support. Combined with the USB-C to HDMI multi-port adapter (which provides a USB-C pass-through port, USB-A port, and an HDMI port), it's close to using a desktop.
I'm used to coding over a terminal, so I use the app Blink Shell to do anything like that since it fully supports external displays (most apps and the iPad interface will display windowboxed). Blink is open-source, and they provide instructions on their github repo, but you can also fund the project by buying it via the App Store.
Unrelated to the actual article but the animated headline/hero image nauseates me. It's such a huge and inappropriate area for animation in general much less a choppy loop of a glaring bright iPad screen.
I think this is another sign that iOS/iPad OS and Mac OS are converging. If I had to guess, once Apple adopts ARM processors for the Mac, there won't be much of a distinction between the two.
Mostly, I just want a normal mouse cursor.
Of course, Apple isn't designing for a user like me, though, I'm really not sure what user they've designed this mouse cursor for.