AirPods charging case as a mouse: the sensor was inside all along

Your AirPods Pro 2 charging case has a set of motion sensors. They were originally responsible for head tracking for spatial audio. Now someone has connected these sensors to the Mac cursor.

The project is called UnMagic Mouse. It was written with Claude Code. Tilt the charging case and the cursor moves with it.

The way it works isn't complicated: the motion sensors in AirPods Pro 2 are exposed to macOS through CoreMotion; a menu bar app converts tilt into cursor movement; a script handles the local build. In the menu you can flip axes and adjust smoothing.

The most interesting part is hardware reuse. There's no new device. The sensors have always been in the earbuds; it's just that no one had connected them to the cursor before. Someone online said this is exactly the kind of “unnecessary innovation” they like.

If you want to try it, you need AirPods Pro 2 and a Mac. The repo is on GitHub; search for UnMagic Mouse. macOS will ask for accessibility permission because the app needs to control the cursor.

The author themself warns that the cursor and clicking are still sensitive. Use it for a few minutes before judging. It's not suitable for photo editing; advancing slides when your hands are full might be more practical.

If you want to build one yourself, you can use this prompt with Claude Code:

build a macOS menu-bar app in Swift that reads AirPods Pro motion with CMHeadphoneMotionManager and moves the cursor by head or case tilt. add a dead zone, a smoothing slider and an axis-flip toggle. give me one build script

The comments also include this line: now you can lose the mouse and the earbuds together down the couch cushions.

Source: nokoxyz's post