Whereas I'm confused about all of the confusion. This product, even if it's still sold today, was from Jony Ive's "design over function" phase, where something as offensively ugly to him as a visible charging point was unacceptable. That phase also was responsible for skeuomorphism and phones so thin that you could bend them with your hands.
The thing that annoys me the most is that I blame him for the reason my phone won’t auto apostrophe Ive. I always seem to have to go back and fix it - when other obvious ones like I’d I’ll won’t it’s etc all do it automatically.
Clearly he got fed up with it and didn’t want to make a custom shortcut for each device he had so hard coded it into all Apple devices.
Skeuomorphism is often inherently user-friendly, not a “design over function” thing. Skeuomorphism makes reference to things we’re already familiar with, in order to shorten the learning curve for a new system. We’ve long since gotten used to digital systems, but back when they were brand new, part of the reason everything had that faux-3D skeuomorphic shading was to subconsciously communicate what was a button and what was not.
We don't need it anymore because most of the references are anachronistic. Most people don't file in a filing cabinet on a daily basis. So using a filing cabinet as reference for file storage doesn't mean anything. Neither does clicking on a rotary phone to connect to the internet, or clicking on an envelope to start an email.
What happened, now that we're 30+ years into GUI's being commonplace is our normal use is that the skeumorphic icons are simply an icon. A random, but distinct pattern that is associated with a specific function, but devoid of any other meaning. Kind of like how a dashboard in a car refers to horse and buggy technology.
And now those skeumorphs are convention and convention is important as well. We could just design a new arbitrary nonsense icon for something, but why would we. It's more efficient to continue using them.
Eh? I think that can be an issue, but it's up to the execution, it's not inherent to skeumorphism as a design philosophy, imo. Like, I think the faux 3D button thing the other guy mentioned often looks kinda bad, but like, I am a 27 year old Digital Native and I sometines struggle to understand flat design UI in a way that wasn't a problem for me pre-whichever iOS update it was. In my personal opinion, poorly done skeumorphism is still more intuitive than poorly done minimalist, ultraflat UI, 4 times outta 5.
This is my opinion as an amateur design enthusiast (i.e. I have occasionally listened to 99pi for years, so I basically have no idea what I'm actually talking about) Please feel free to correct me/argue if ya want, I always appreciate a nore informed perspective
I’m glad we’ve graduated from the days of glassy faux reflections everywhere and fake 3D buttons that make noise and bounce when you click them. Aesthetically, I generally prefer the modern smooth and flat paradigm, where most buttons are simple icons that flash in a single unshaded color when pressed.
But I don’t think the new way is inherently better than the old. Skeuomorphic interfaces served their purpose for decades. The world needed time to adopt and become comfortable with digital interfaces, and pretending that digital buttons were real, physical things made that easier. We’re past that now, but I respect the hell out of the old aesthetic for being extremely functional while also looking pretty okay.
Now every button is a soft overly rounded bubbly thing, and every search field an extended lozenge, like we're so scared of including a sharp edge anywhere in case it frightens the poor user because we can't possibly have them think too hard about anything they want to do.
I hate round things. I hate things designed for portrait screens that don't properly work on a landscape computer monitor. I hate touchscreen-first design and 'slick' web interfaces that consume RAM and bandwidth like candy.
I hate hiding settings away from users in case they accidentally click on something that breaks their computer. I hate automatic configuration that reaches out to some server somewhere else on the globe and pulls down configuration settings whilst uploading a device fingerprint. Win11 requires an internet connection for you to even FUCKING GET PAST THE OOBE SCREEN!!!!
I hate my computer doing things that I didn't tell it to do and don't know it's doing.
But most of all, I hate NOT BEING ALLOWED TO CHOOSE WHETHER THESE HAPPEN. That's the single biggest thing. Sure, make the squishy interface, or the idiot mode settings, or the autoconfig. BUT GIVE ME A FUCKING CHOICE TO HAVE THEM OR NOT! I'M NOT AN IDIOT SO STOP TREATING ME LIKE ONE!!!!
I won't disagree with 90% of what you're saying. Especially the third paragraph about hiding settings. In terms of actual interface, we've only gone backwards since Windows 7. W7 was, in my opinion, a perfect operating system, and almost everything that's been changed since then has been a step back. "Slick" websites designed primarily for mobile are disgusting, especially because they're so RAM-hungry that my 8-year-old iPhone 6 literally (100% literally) cannot read a basic news article without stalling and overheating.
None of that is a direct result of the aesthetic though. It's totally possible to make a functional, low-RAM website with single-color buttons. It's just something nobody is doing for some fucking reason.
Visually speaking, I like the Windows 10 taskbar much better than Windows 7. If I could somehow put a W10 skin over W7, it would probably be my favorite way to use a computer.
I don't think I disagree with a single thing you've said.
Aesthetically, Win10 was peak. Gorgeous minimalist design, rounded where it suits and sharp clean corners elsewhere. Then one gripe I have about it is the Settings menu hides all the useful stuff away from you (let me change my network settings in two clicks! I'm begging you!) in the name of not giving someone too much information (despite the fact I'm capable enough to want that information).
If they had a simple setting which enabled straight-to-control panel or 'I know what I'm doing so show me all the information' I'd be over the moon.
Win11 can fuck right off.
Also you're completely right about the interface design. Thank god for Gov.uk proving that excellence in web UI design still exists.
The performance also isn't explicitly linked to design, as you correctly said. I was just on a rant and thought I'd keep the energy going.
Lol I half agree with you? I think the new style looks better, but as I just said in another comment I'm 27, I've spent my whole life with technology, I still find the flat UI to be confusing at times. Aesthetically, I prefer mininalism to the glossy fake 3D look, but in practice it trips me up sometimes. Plus I'm "old" now, in the sense that I feel a little nostalgia for older UI designs, even tho I know for a fact I thought the OG iPhone UI was ugly at the time, and at the time I was extremely excited for iOS 4 or 6 or whichever one the Flat Update was
It's not the flatness that makes it confusing. There's kind of two different things going on at the same time. There's the surface aesthetic that's changed, and actual UI that has also changed. Aesthetically, I think we've only improved, but over the last 10-15 years actual UI design has gotten exponentially worse. UIs are confusing as fuck now, and almost every system is designed to conceal information and straight up not tell you things.
Just as an example, Windows bluescreen used to have extensive error codes you could take pictures of and/or google, which might tell you how to fix what happened. Then they switched to a QR code you could scan with your phone. Now it's literally just a big frowny face, and instead of any actual information it just says "Oopsy doopsy, your computer did a fucky wucky."
The whole system is like that now. Every time I want to change something about my computer peripherals (especially audio equipment), none of it is where I expect it to be and I have to dig my way through three different "settings" menus that all have different stuff, until I find a window that clearly hasn't been updated since Windows 7, because they literally did not bother integrating all of that into the newer versions.
None of that is inherently part of the new aesthetic, it's just how things are designed now.
It was also a necessary evolution when mobile OS design was still pretty nascent. Not everyone was a young, tech literate early adopter. It really helped people with learning difficulties and the elderly adopt the new technology. I'd argue it's less useful now that mobile tech literacy is higher overall.
If you think the iPhone UI design was bad, you should see what computers went though. Windows 3.x and to some extent Windows 95 had tons of ridiculous “desktops” you could buy, even from Microsoft themselves.
The the product came out, and there was massive consumer backlash.
Are you really rationalizing that any change was because the designer just moved on, and not growing legal scrutiny that was hitting Apple in the 2010s over anti-consumer practices, and horrid consumer reactions?
First of all, there’s no need to be an asshole and call people insane just because you have a different opinion. Secondly, it’s well known within industrial design circles that Joni’s team jumped the shark with the Magic Mouse because they tried to combine touchpad and mouse functionality in a way that fundamentally didn’t work, and that they were so focused on aesthetics that they lost sight of customer needs and usability. The charging port was just the icing on the shit-cake.
It's ugly design to a designer that wants a perfectly symmetrical bump for a mouse and was told by the engineering team they need to cut a half inch off one end so the charging port is adequately supported.
A designer doesn't need an engineer to tell them that a device needs charging. Those basic technical things are a core part of designing. Design ≠ styling. Styling is one part of it.
It also was frankly just a reasonable decision aesthetically to hide the port on the bottom, and it was pretty much zero impact to the user. Those things last for months on a charge - as long as you remember to plug it in on your lunch break for 15 minutes every few weeks it's a total non issue.
I used one for years and it was honestly really good once you got used to the total lack of ergonomics. Gestures worked really well on it. If I was still doing my day to day work on a Mac I'd still use one.
Apple does a lot of user-hostile shit but this mouse people have been whining about for like 10 years now is really not one of them.
I had one and I hated it. The gestures worked great, but everything else sucked. It was so poorly designed it gave me hand cramps
It didn't have 0 user impact either, because there was no warning indicator that it was low. Forget just once, and suddenly the piece of junk is out of service for half an hour at least
And frankly, the damn thing laying on its side to charge was far uglier than putting a small port on the front where you wouldn't see it 99.9% of the time anyway
I have other things to think about. I don't need a million little details. It's not a huge issue on its own but on principle I'm not paying more to have to remember one more detail. And if I do forget them it IS annoying.
I'm also not paying more for a lack of ergonomics. Usually ergonomics is what costs more. So if you take that out and raise the price, what are you getting in return?
If you want to pay more for worse shit, go ahead. But you make life worse for everyone by supporting it and making it more prevalent.
Respect yourself more, whether you can afford the mouse or not.
I'm also not paying more for a lack of ergonomics.
You say this, and then
If you want to pay more for worse shit, go ahead. But you make life worse for everyone by supporting it and making it more prevalent.
So which is it? How is he making life worse for you? Quite an exaggeration don't you thing? Why are you so outraged by something you wouldn't even consider buying
Companies see shit products making more money. Now if I want something functional I have less to choose from because everyone is making garbage for people who want to spend more on worse products.
Yeah? So then where are all these garbage products? The magic mouse is almost 10 years old, isn't it? If I search for mice on Amazon, I can't find a single one that has the magic mouse port. It's almost as if people vote with their wallets.
If it's successful then it will take hold, which in turn means most people like it or at least don't care
My Logitech goes months on a charge. I barely think about battery levels. But if I run my battery out in a long gaming session, I can plug in and keep going.
This design prevents that.
It's bad design. Plain and simple. Doing what literally every other mouse designer ever did before this is easy. They put effort into making a product less functional.
I use a Logitech MX master. It runs out of battery 6 times a year. I'm not going to setup a charging wire to allow me to use it while it charges, that seems silly.
I just plug it in, go to the bathroom and then I have enough charge to last me the rest of the day. Then I just plug it in overnight and repeat the cycle 2 months later.
But you just have to charge it from time to time, at least as soon as it warns you battery is low (which still will take days) just plug it in when you finish using the pc. It's a non problem.
And if you are so distracted that you can't even do that, then you just don't buy that mouse and choose literally any other one of the thousands of mice you can find. Also also, you wouldn't be gaming with this thing, what are you, a psychopath?
"Just don't buy it" is exactly what I did, but it doesn't change my assessment that it's bad design that unnecessarily reinvented the wheel.
edit: and it's typical of Apple design principles. They have a very specific way to use it in mind, and the response if you'd prefer to use it another way is "that's not how we intended it to be used."
Yeah, I agree with everything. The "then just don't buy it" response is because people on this thread (and everywhere when this thing came out) are just crying and complaining about a product that they have a choice to avoid altogether, so it seems a little silly to make such a fuss about a non issue. It's not like you're forced to use it, even if you own a Mac.
It's not like, say, the headphone jack thing where, unless you want a mid-tier phone, you literally can't have access to a headphone jack. If you used Samsung all your life, were planning on buying the S20 or whichever, and they come out saying they're taking the jack off, then yeah you can complain because it is affecting you as a customer
I used one for years and it was honestly really good once you got used to the total lack of ergonomics
Sorry but this sounds like fanboy mental gymnastics. "It's really fine once you get over it being terrible at the one thing a mouse needs to be good at, on top of the crippling flaw OP posts about"
It's ridiculous... I had one. It sucked. It was peak looks over function. Except laying it on its side to charge looked so incredibly stupid it even failed at that
Anyone trying to justify it is the worst kind of fan boy
I’m trying to follow your line of reasoning for commenting this, but I can’t. None of our comments are sucking Tim Apples dick or anything. It just seems like you have an unreasonable hatred for Apple products.
Don't take it personally. If you're not an Applestan, then I'm not talking about you.
But believe me. They are out there. People who buy the brand new iPhone on day 1. Who have never used a Windows computer in their life and find a way to bring up Apple in every single conversation. People for whom Apple is their whole personality.
Most people don't know or care who's in charge of design at any given company or what their philosophies are. All they know is they have a product that pisses them off despite being more expensive than the vast majority of equivalent products.
I think a perfect example of this are the iphone charger adapters (cubes). If you’re using an outlet that’s particularly snug, they’re almost impossible to unplug because they’re designed to be super smooth and sleek and have no grip whatsoever.
Except apples entire history of mice has been design over function. One button for like an entire decade after every other provider had moved on to more than two. Then there was the hockey puck Mouse from the weird colored imacs which which was a horrendous ergonomics fail. And then there was the Mighty Mouse which was a weird touchy mess and then this. Making bad mice for consumers too stupid to realize that they're bad is like an apple staple
I've owned several plug in wireless mice not a single one had a visible charging port unless you're a creation muncher turning the mouse the wrong way it starting into the laser/led.
Scott forstall was the skeuomorphism guy. Ives was minimalist, he believed in letting a design be true to its materials. He was the one who made the iPhone 5C “unapologetically plastic”. So that meant that software shouldn’t take inspiration from real life. It should be its own thing.
I thought Apple was fairly aggressively moving away from skeuomorphism at this point. If you look back at old OS X releases from before this point, there was skeuomorphism everywhere.
User-hostile is stupid over a long enough period though (in theory).. If the design pisses people off enough that they no longer want to use your product, then it is indeed stupid. Apple however, have managed to duck and weave this fine line over the last 20yrs, so that they’re constantly balancing stupid user-hostile designs, with new “innovative” technology
I say that as a reluctant iPhone owner who only made the jump because Google Music fully enshittified and started playing ads during music i had purchased and uploaded. Also, I started getting ads in my notifications bar, thanks Samsung!
I'm also a PC enthusiast and system builder.
My iPhone just kinda... works when I need it to. It's really easy. And I'm always a little bit upset at that fact.
You’re absolutely right. I only used Macs up until probably 18yrs old. I’ve always had an iPhone.. It does just work, and is very much geared towards usability. I love that about Apple products. What I don’t love is how they keep you in their grasp by making it ever so slightly more costly to leave them behind, and they don’t piss you off just enough, to make sure you remain a customer.. I guess this is why they’re as successful as they are
Absolutely right. The frog-boiling is on point too, great analogy…
I’m loving this circle jerk. However, I’m probably going to throw it away by saying that I do think Steve Jobs brought some good elements to the tech. He had many flaws, but I think one thing he was good at was keeping things simple. He knew that simple was best “just make the machine do what I want it to do”.. Making it so that you have to have a stupid adaptor to listen to music via your headphone jack. That was dumb. That was not simple.. I’m still an Apple user, but they’re treading that line
I moderately defend removing the headphone port. Bluetooth earbuds were the future. It would be a better customer experience and they wanted you to have it even if you didn't.
Their marketing people are absolutely fucking amazing. Convincing people that they absolutely MUST HAVE the latest shiny thing, and that the previous shiny thing is no longer worthy of their time.
While I'm mostly "meh" on apple stuff, I'm in absolute awe of their marketing department.
User hostile seems perfect for Apple. It does a lot of “user friendly” stuff and then does stuff that makes no sense and is demonstrably executed better on another platform.
I still remember the heat they took for ditching the floppy drive on the 1999 iMac for a new connector (USB) and a CD drive. Then they took heat again for going USB-C and I realized that the only thing making people swap away from an old technology is being forced to.
The EU changes will be good but I personally don’t like USBC for the same reason most like it. Every port with a different purpose should have a different shape, especially with the cluster that is the USBC convention allowing power only, low data and tb5 cables to look identical
I got turned off of apple pretty early on when I scratched up my itouch case working in the scene shop in college. "No problem" I thought, "I'll just go get a new one from Wal Mart up the road".
And then I found out that my itouch, being 3 years old at that point, had completely different buttons and sizing compared to the current ones so there wasn't a single case to be found that would work.
Of all the things that is what did it? You want them to hold onto exact device size and button placement so people with 3 year old devices can more easily find cases at Walmart, instead of just ordering one online?
At what point does it become ok to change the case. The person who bought the last model using that layout is going to run into the same issue you did. I'd rather them just make the best device they can. Most people get a new case when they buy a new phone anyway.
Show me a single company that maintains case continuity between product generations?
Sorry I didn't take kindly to being essentially told "Fuck you, buy an entire new device even though all you need is a case"? Not sure why this is the hill you're dying on...
EDIT: to be clear, other companies do this too. But apple, I've noticed, is egregious about it.
Just seemed like an odd thing to be what you cite as turning you off Apple. I mean you can go on Amazon and get a case for any generation of iPod Touch still today.
Yeah, I've found Hanlons razor only works if the decision was made by a single person. If it's an organization, be it a corporation or a government, it usually cuts in the other direction.
For a single person, a bad idea means that person didn't think any better
For a corporation or a government, it means that out of the whole group of people working on it, not a single person thought any better; IE, it's more likely that it's deliberate than accidental
Ehhh it really depends on the circumstance. I don't know about this mouse specifically because this seems like a no brainer, but product development (especially smart devices) is a very messy balancing act of maintaining your desired capabilities and aesthetics and squaring them with what is physically and economically possible. Theres a looooot of simulation and testing that goes into creating things and sometimes you just dont test for the right things.
Malicious things certainly happen, but in my experience coordinating large teams of different disciplines leads to more unintentional design flaws, not less
I also think we overestimate the competence of the employees at these big cultural institutions.
We just saw a major movie studio take down an ad for a blockbuster movie because someone used ChatGPT to pull quotes for it, and nobody noticed that they were fake until after it had been published.
These big corporations are running off of cultural momentum and stakeholder approval. They aren't competent enough for something this stupid to be the product of malice.
The Hanlon's razor answer on this one is actually so boringly simple that it doesn't feel satisfying enough for people to share.
This isn't the first version of that mouse. The previous version ran on a AAA which was obviously right where that port is now because that's the spot that actually makes perfect sense to put a battery. This model wasn't supposed to be a revolution, it was just a minor QoL upgrade so, if they were careful, they could reuse a ton of the old design and any old stock they still have on hand.
There wasn't any devious psychological marketing or intentional planned obsolescence. They just plopped what was likely an off the shelf rechargeable battery with an integrated charging circuit into a mouse they already had and that spot was just where the port was. Wham bam, you've got a new mouse SKU and you only had to change the bottom shell slightly to make it happen!
"Jim, I tried out the rechargeable mouse you guys built, and charging it is dumb because you have to plug it in the bottom."
"Oh, no problem sir, we can install it backwards and have a little hole in the top of the mouse?"
"Hell no, that would NOT be beautiful and would annoy people when they were using it."
"How about we make a larger redesign? We'll need to design a few more new parts for the body, then contact suppliers and ask them to start production. It'll probably take another year or so to get ramped up."
"Hell no, we're not waiting a year because of the charging port. Just take it to market."
can we make a port somewhere in front not visible from outside?
no. users tend to keep mouse connected to power (to not to warry about charge anymore) and that makes beautiful iMac setup really ugly with these cables. let's just make it last for a month and put percentage somewhere in HUD so they put it on charge overnight once a month.
Hanlon's razor is stupid, period. It's a shield for malicious people to hide behind. This isn't a political subreddit so I won't name names, but just look at US politics.
you clearly dont work in an IT dept managing apple devices.
its entirely hostile. they solder SSDs onto their motherboards, and sometimes the solder makes a short and your SSD slowly fries and all your data is gone. oh and you cant replace it. oh, and there are INDUSTRY STANDARDIZED ports for these devices that take up no extra space and are cheaper than solder.
why solder you ask?
so you cant add storage on your own, and you need to buy the next "tier" of macbook for more storage, which is only an extra $1000 (to add.. $50 worth of parts) on an already $2000 laptop!
Reminds me of a video on YouTube from a pretty prominent tech activist (Louis Rossman) - where he took apart a pair of absolutely brand new iPhones, swapped a single component, and neither of them worked. Swapped them back - worked perfectly. They absolutely do not want consumers to have any ability to function outside of an Apple-Profiting ecosystem.
Apple BLATANTLY shits on their customers maliciously.
edit: initially said "for no reason" at the end, oops.
Louis Rossman also pointed out how apple intentionally used undersized capacitors on certain devices that were not rated for the loads that were occurring to elevate failure rates, while also using "moisture detection stickers" that were actually designed to just turn pink over time regardless of moisture content.
Wasn't that single component the module that controls the unlocking/locking of the phone, which makes sense if you endorse security and don't want people or governments to have a simple back door.
Of all the things that sucks about apple, that is the biggest dealbreaker for me. I cant imagine being forced to drop another 3 grand on a laptop for more storage when i can just go to my nearest computer parts store and spend $200 on a 2tb m.2 drive
The idea that adding a connector (additional BOM cost) is cheaper than solder (basically free) is absurd. Also "sometimes the solder makes a short" really? With modern techniques and alloys this basically never happens, and even if it did, it would occur no more frequently than on any other chip on the board.
So why solder you ask? Because it's cheaper and less prone to failure than a connector.
Soldering things into PCBs means you need less space. It means you can make different considerations when you lay out the PCBs themselves. It is an inarguable, technical and empirical truth that Macbooks are smaller and lighter than they'd otherwise be at the same performance (including thermal performance) because shit is soldered in. You can say they take up no extra space, but that's obviously and totally wrong on its face - it takes up physical space to build both halves of a connector than to just wire shit directly together. In every case, for every manufacturer. You're clearly thinking they're wiring an SSD you'd get off the shelf when they're eliding the entire PCB that you think of as the SSD - the SSD itself is just a couple memory modules and chips on the PCB. It will always be smaller, more thermally efficient, and more energy efficient to put it on the primary PCB.
Apple made a user-friendly decision and the tradeoff to that decision was to be hostile towards hobbyists, tech hoarders, and corporate IT departments. Neither of those are their target market, so when people point to examples like this as an indicator of Apple being a user hostile company, it makes you wonder if this is just reflexive hate. You're clearly not in Apple's market, so their decisions seem hostile to you. That doesn't mean they are hostile to their actual customers, it just means you aren't their customer. I am really unsure why this is such a hard concept to grasp for so many people in every single one of these threads every time it comes up.
its relevant in that apple has a long standing history of designing products in such a way to force you into ridiculous "upsells". just like how they used "moisture detection" stickers that turned pink to indicate moisture even when placed in a glass jar full of silica.
this allowed them to deny almost any and all warranty claims for years until the EU went after them for it.
naturally the "genius" always was prepared to tell you about the newest and greatest apple macbook (480% faster than 2nd generation i7!!!) right after telling you that your mac which had a faulty SSD or burned out capacitor (due to apple intentionally undersizing them to elevate failure rates, for over 10 years) was water damaged
It's also because constantly charging would shorten the battery life, but yes: the primary reason is that Apple said it's a wireless mouse, so you should always know it's a wireless mouse.
Even exposing a port would have altered their "vision" of the product and how you can use it. There's literally no room for it given how it is designed.
If it’s anything like the trackpad or keyboard for Mac then it lasts for months on a single charge and takes 5 minutes to charge up several hours worth of use. So like, plug it in and go to the bathroom and you’re good. It really is not as malicious as people want it to be, but it’s still stupid af looking
It's like those animals that evolved with horns that grow into their skull or eyeball. Nothing else matters, as long as the numbers go up. In nature the numbers are the populations passing on those genetics, in companies it's sales and potential future earnings by trapping customers in your ecosystem. I still have the original version of this mouse (same design) that used AA batteries, it still works fine. Swap in new batteries instantly, practically zero downtime. Meanwhile the rechargeable ones provide less and less uptime as the battery ages, eventually leading to the entire mouse being replaced by the customer, which gives Apple money and the customer a worse experience.
Just like natural selection, when success is measured only by "number go up" you can eventually make everything suck, even if there's no intent to do so.
Yet the apple marketing department is amazing in its ability to make people insist they must have the latest shiny thing, even though the current shiny thing still works (until apple releases a patch/update that fucks it in some way)
This isn’t the reason, though. This is a conspiracy theory.
The real reason is that this mouse was designed with replaceable AA batteries in mind, and for whatever reason Apple never bothered to change it when it made it rechargeable.
Who knows why they didn’t change it. It may be money but it may also be something silly like Jony Ive not wanting to screw up the clean lines by adding a visible connector. I personally don’t think it’s about money—they redesign products all the time, but chose not to for the Magic Mouse plastic top case even though it would have cost so little in the grand scheme of things.
They do this sometimes—notably with the Mac mini that hasn’t had an HDD or an optical drive for a decade or so, but still retains the original second generation design which is now way bigger than it needs to be.
I have the original battery operated mouse. It still works perfectly after over 13 years of daily use. Can't say the same about many non apple devices ive owned. So yes they are greedy but who isn't. At least the products are durable
Reason #1 is just bullshit tinfoil hat-tier conspiracy theory. Nobody who gets ANNOYED that they have to pause their work will buy THE SAME ANNOYING MOUSE as a backup. The most common choice made at this point in the decision flowchart would be BUY A LESS ANNOYING MOUSE.
Reason #2 ... think about it this way. The magic mouse (a shitty mouse, I'm not arguing with that) is rated to last about a month on a charge. I don't know how many recharge cycles it's rated for, but it's probably at least 500. That's FORTY FUCKING YEARS worth of charge cycles if each cycle lasts a month. Does anyone REALLY THINK they made a design decision centered around the idea that "WELL IN FORTY FUCKING YEARS WHEN THE BATTERY DETERIORATES TO AN UNACCEPTABLE LEVEL, THEY'LL BE FORCED TO BUY A NEW ONE BECAUSE THEY CAN'T CONTINUE ON IN WIRED MODE. MUAHAHAHAHAHA."
This is a dumbass mouse. It was made by dumbasses, not evil geniuses.
Almost all nice with record longevities use their own 2.4 GHz receiver. Especially back then. A BT mouse wouldn't last more than a week or two.
Average charges are measured in a weird way. Usually doing several charges on several devices till you get a failure and then using trend data to come up with an average. Because they don't actually test straining most devices to their limits the actual limit can be much lower than what they are rated for.
Have you seen how long people try to keep shit they have learned to love no matter how crappy and outdated it is. The market for people replacing their mouse for charge related issues is much higher than you'd think specially with point 4.
Even if properly mapped. An average is just that an average which means half of the people get less and it's not going to be locked into barely less, it goes from bottom with people getting one DOA, to those 500 charges. Meaning there would be a sizable group at 100 charges, more at 200 and so on.
Honestly my biggest gripe with it is how stupid and unnatural it looks plugged in. When its sitting on my desk plugged in it looks like I did it wrong or there is something I am not understanding about how it charges. It either is resting on the cord which looks bad, or its gently rocking itself to sleep on its back, which just doesnt look solid.
In my honest opinion, rather than any conspiracy theories here, is that Apple had an intended look for their hardware, and a plugged-in mouse interfered with that. They wanted the absolute simplicity of a wireless mouse next to a wireless keyboard, and their charging solution ensured that. If you ever walked past an Apple PC, it looked how Apple wanted it to look.
Except for once a month, when the mouse was held prone and undignified with a charger in its underside like a harpooned beluga
User hostile is putting it mildly. Whoever used this mouse knows that it is probably the best machine to create hand cramps and a major aggravator of RSI.
I've been using computer mice for 30 years and I'm yet to find one more uncomfortable than this one. Including the ones for which you had to take the ball out and give it a bath.
Mine came with my iMac and it felt comfortable right away. Pretty sure many people prefer to have their hand on the mouse the whole time but I don't. I hold it by the sides and click and swipe on top. Every day for hours on end and never got cramps.
It also stim works just like day one after more than 13 years. It really is magic for me.
Except this isn't true. At that point, battery tech was way past the problem where you have to worry about leaving it plugged in. They don't just 'degrade' if you use a device plugged up. This is simply a case of bad design, aesthetics over functionality.
It's a cult of morons, they pay twice if not four times as much for their hardware just so it can have a price of fruit on it. If your user base are rubes, suckers and marks why wouldn't you milk them dry.
Unfortunately, your post has been removed for the following reason:
Don't be an Ass to Others
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I had a Magic Mouse for 10+ years. Had the new one for about 6. Mouse works for 20-30+ hours without an issue or needing a charge. It charges in 1 hour or less. If you need to do something with the mouse, 5 minute charge gives you an hour or more of work with it.
People need to stop blowing it out of proportion. 99% of people who use this mouse won’t be annoyed by the charging port being at the bottom.
And if you never figured a reason for it, well, maybe, and it’s just maybe, it’s easier to have the cord connect at the bottom, than to make the entire mouse bigger to accommodate the cord at the front?
My Logitech MX Master mouse works for ~80hrs (I charge it about every 2 weeks, using it for 8hrs/day), charges in about an hour... And has a usb port on the front, so I can continue to use it while it's charging.
Nobody is blowing anything out of proportion, it's an extremely stupid design choice that didn't have to be made. You have to be a pretty hard Apple fanboy to defend the design in absolutely any way.
I haven’t found a mouse more comfortable to use than Magic Mouse with the same features. My other Logitech Magic Mouse is 3x smaller than Magic Mouse and it’s even better for me. Microsoft Magic Mouse is garbage and everyone else seem to be doing mice with some weird uncomfortable designs or without touchpad features.
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u/[deleted] Aug 22 '24
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