Review of Logitech Anywhere MX 2s vs. MX Master 2s
After working for a long time with a basic cable mouse, I thought it was time for an upgrade. And since it’s such a major piece of hardware, I went right for the flagship segment.
Logitech offers its premium mouse MX Master 2s as a more portable Anywhere MX 2s version.
Since I work on my laptop a lot, I bought the portable Anywhere MX 2s at around EUR 60. Here are the useful features:
- Works on any surface – even on glass!
- Sideways-moving mousewheel for horizontal scrolling
- Extra fast wheel for horizontal scrolling
- Rechargeable – no external battery
- Bluetooth and dongle connection
- Small enough for portable use
- Gesture button – great for switching windows (Alt + Tab)
- Customizable thumb buttons
Then there’s the pretty fancy but useless feature of Logitech Flow, which lets you use the mouse on two devices at once. I only use one laptop, or a second screen at best.
Altough I was pretty happy at first, there’s one basic feature missing which broke the deal for me. Logitech’s customer support forums are full of rants by CAD engineers – the Logitech Anywhere MX 2s has no middle click on the scroll wheel.
Any mouse with a scroll wheel has this function, but Logitech took it out of the Anywhere MX 2s. It took me an hour to figure this out, of course, because the middle wheel does click, but it’s purely haptic and has no function.
So then I returned it and bought the bigger MX Master 2s at around EUR 80. It’s not exactly portable. The MX Master 2s has most of the functions that the MX Anywhere 2s has. The differences, in my opinion, are rather annoying:
- It has a clickable thumb rest; I don’t really need it, and I find clicking with my thumb awkward
- The wheel doesn’t move sideways; instead, you have a thumb wheel; I liked having all scroll functions in the wheel
- The fast-scroll toggle is an extra switch, instead of just clicking the wheel – so you have to keep one button assigned to switching the wheel between fast scroll and slow scroll mode, if you want to switch
All in all, I think the MX 2s series doesn’t need 2 models. The bigger version is too clunky and costs almost EUR 20 more, and the smaller version is great, but dropped a core feature that all mice should have. So in the end I kind of had to buy the bigger model.
Nevertheless, these two were the best mice I could find. The all-surface feature, fast scrolling, and the rechargeable battery are impossible to find in the lower price range.
If you work mostly stationary, get the MX Master 2s. If you need portability and don’t care about the missing middle click, the smaller version will do. Logitech’s previous models are also a lot cheaper on Amazon now.
