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How to Use a Mouse with an iPad (without Jailbreaking)

How to Use a Mouse with an iPad (without Jailbreaking)

While iPads were developed explicitly for accessible touch controls, using a mouse is more familiar and sometimes preferred. Compared to mobile devices and laptops, iPads are more portable and easy to configure to your needs.

Fortunately, you can connect a mouse to your iPad without jailbreaking it! Keep reading to find out how.

How to Connect a Mouse to Your iPad With a Cable

  1. Use a Lightning-to-USB cable that looks similar to this:

Most Lightning-to-USB cables are affordable and range between 1 and 2 meters long. Purchasing one with a built-in wheel can keep it from becoming tangled. Otherwise, you can buy a cable organizing clip. 

  1. Connect the Lightning-to-USB cable to the power slot at the bottom of your iPad. Connect the mouse to the USB slot.
  2. Your iPad should automatically discover the mouse, and the cursor will appear on your device’s display. 

How to Connect a Mouse to Your iPad Wirelessly

If your wireless mouse has a USB receiver, you can connect the receiver to the Lightning-to-USB cable as you would with a wired mouse. However, most wireless mice have direct Bluetooth capabilities that enable users to connect to their iPads without an extension or plug.

Using the same process, you can connect a wired or wireless keyboard to your iPad. However, you can’t use a mouse and keyboard simultaneously.

In addition, Apple forums confirm you can only perform this method on iPads newer than the 4th generation (2016).

Thanks to this no-jailbreak method of connecting a mouse to your iPad, you won’t have to risk voiding your warranty, and you can be more productive! Let us know your favorite mice to use with your iPad in the comments below.

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Nath

Monday 10th of June 2019

Legit curious about this: " The only downside here is that, using this method, you can’t use both a mouse and a keyboard at the same time."

Did you try it with a USB hub?

Calin Ciabai

Tuesday 11th of June 2019

Good point - at the moment of writing this article, no USB hub was used.

Nath

Monday 10th of June 2019

Pardon me but this line is not accurate: "ignored by Apple (and most other tablet manufacturers out there)."

EVERY OTHER MANUFACTURER OFFERS MOUSE SUPPORT. Even Jailbroken ipads offer it - hence your article.

Apple is a ridiculous outlier in specifically not allowing mouse access, and this point is critical to note.

Noah Tsaying

Tuesday 27th of November 2018

The best answer available on the net is that there actually was a supported mouse driver through iOS 9.x answers along the lines of ‘’there is no mouse pointer in iOS” is just plain wrong, did’t you ever notice the text cursor moving around under your finger? That it doesn’t *displa* an arrow to indicate the location of your fingertip in other contexts doesn’t mean it isn’t keeping track of the location. If you’re thinking “it needs a graphics controller with sprite hardware” it tine to put down your Apple IIe manual. An OS interacts with any pointing device in a fundamentally similar way, be it intinsicsly relative position device like a mouse, or an absolute position device like a touch screen or an old school magnetostrictive digitizer for drawing. The OS gets status messages at regular intervals from the pointing device with information about position and the status of feature actions like buttons taps swipes of lifted/touching etc. The visible result of that pointing device message may or may not cause the OS to change update the display, but the pointer location and status always exists.

william zhao

Monday 1st of October 2018

First off, this is obviously a lie. And, if you scroll to the bottom, you see that this site is affiliated with Amazon. This article was just a tactic to sell stuff on Amazon. Wow

Jameson Langston

Friday 10th of August 2018

This is a proven lie. The iOS lineup was not made to support mice and/or trackpads. Also he clearly has no idea what he is talking about because what he is showing does not correlate with what he is talking about. If you want to use a mouse, you can use the mouse jailbraik from cydia or use a Remote Desktop.