For me, the charge port at the bottom is a clear case of design being more important than functionality. Of course, if you're the kind of person that always remembers to charge their mouse before the battery runs out, it's not an issue for you, but for the "rest of us", having the option to charge it and use it at the same time would sure be handy...
Because pedantry is king at hn. Design was not the most important aspect of the magic mouse, _aesthetics_ was. A key difference in this conversation.
Aesthetically the mouse is great, very beautiful, especially for the time it came out.
The design of the mouse is amazing in several ways, but very lacking in others, specifically ergonomics and charging. In fact, had they made the mouse larger, in all dimensions, they could have solved two birds with one stone. The mouse is too small to comfortable use for most people, making it larger would fit the human hand better and decrease the amount of contortion your hand has to do to use it. And with this extra height they could have put a charging port on the front! Win win on the design side of things!
There are several products you can buy that help with this, I have both wings and a palm bump added to my magic mouse that makes it much more comfortable. I tried to take one apart once to explore making a new case for it that addresses some of these concerns, but I ended up breaking it.
I think that final bit really is the crux, the scrolling and gesture support is so good I'm sufficiently motivated to try and solve the problems with the mouse. A beautifully flawed product.
Thanks for pointing that out! I'm not a native speaker, and around here (Germany) the loan word "design" refers only to designing the aesthetic side of things. Again what learned (https://www.nicolabartlett.de/again-what-learned/)...
> Because pedantry is king at hn. Design was not the most important aspect of the magic mouse, _aesthetics_ was. A key difference in this conversation.
Be as pedantic as you want, but aesthetics is an aspect of design, not exclusive to it.
This topic comes up again and again, and what I’ve noticed is that folks who use the mouse often find that it lasts for months and months without recharging. Folks that like the mouse (myself included) agree that the frequency of charging is very low, while folks that don’t like the mouse will say that it’s unacceptable.
I use the wireless Apple keyboard and trackpad, which both have similar battery lives, but when the battery runs out it always somehow happens to be right before a meeting where I really need to plug it in and use it right now
(and these days when everything else is USB-C, instead I'm scrambling to find where my damn lightning cable has gone)
Although I get why they would not put the port on the back - their Lightning cables are not built for the repeated motion/strain of a plugged-in mouse. Anything more strain than plugging your phone in and setting it down causes the cables to break down in months.
I can only recommend using BetterTouchTool for adding more guestures to the mouse - and it comes with a nice feature, it reminds me when the charge of the mouse goes below 25%. This gives me several days to recharge it before it actually gets low.
Similar as in you're not recharging it on a daily or weekly basis, but only very rarely. A 3 or 6 month battery life doesn't make a big difference on that scale.
Some of us who use the mouse always want to keep it plugged in all the time because the extra cable on the desk is less important to us than (a) having it not occasionally glitch due to Bluetooth and/or (b) not wanting the extra burden of having to charge it. I guess scheduling the charging is minor if you don’t have ADHD, but it’s still one more stupid thing to take care of that really isn’t necessary.
I have ADHD, but it presents itself differently. For me, a more minimal desk free of the sight of cables (all the time) and free of annoyance of the tension of a cable or sound of a cable grazing against the desk (all the time) trumps plugging in a mouse twice a year when I stop working for the day. But I’m the type that can’t focus when I see a battery icon is low, and so I’ll just take care of it when I notice.
I, too, think that an extra battery isn’t worth it, but that there are people who want a mouse that is always plugged in doesn’t mean a wireless mice that can’t always be plugged in is badly designed.
It almost feels like the silly charging port was placed there on purpose. It tells users that you're not meant to use it plugged in, stop worrying about the battery, it'll be fine. And conversely it forces the engineers to build something that doesn't need to be charged constantly.
...I still prefer my Logitech mouse that works plugged in though.
In my experience it needed charging much more frequently than that, and often at completely unpredictable and inconvenient times. I resorted to keeping a spare plugged in at all times when I worked in an office.
I saw an article where someone rigged the magic mouse so that the cord was not on the bottom. They found that the mouse was unable to be used while charging. So putting the charge port on the bottom may have been driven by larger design decisions that made use while charging not possible.
What’s so wild to me about this, is that the Magic Mouse design is 100% evident there was meant to be a flush charging dock sister product that got nix’d just like the recent wireless charging pad — there’s intention and a continuity one can follow, but recently has been cut at the knees for operational efficiency.
With the example of the charger-on-the-bottom, where does the break down come from?
Was this never even considered an issue? As in, did it just never get considered as something bad? Did it never get focus grouped in a wide enough range of users for someone to question this? Was it noticed, questioned, decided it was works as intended?
It just seems like with a company the size of Apple who all work under draconian NDAs, why not have an internal employee focus group? Hubris of the design silos?
Have you used it and found an actual issue with the problem? If you randomly remember 1 time a month to plug it in when you go to lunch its effectively a non-issue. Consider it was well thought out.
The few times I've been asked to help my neighbors on the computer, it has been a non-starter because the mouse needed charging and we were unable to do anything because of it. :(
> having the option to charge it and use it at the same time would sure be handy
That’s the theory. In practice, charging it whilst getting a coffee gives it enough battery life to finish the day. Sure, you need to remember to charge it then. But you never have to chose between using it or charging it for more than a couple of minutes in the real life.
> but the battery lasts for several weeks if not months; i
In my experience, this is exactly why it's an issue.
All my less tech savvy family who use this mouse forget to charge it because "it never needs charging" ... and then it runs out of juice whilst they are in the midst of something and now they can't use the mouse.
macOS literally nags for days on end - easily an entire week - when the battery is running low before it actually runs out. It starts notifying when the battery level is 10%.
I don't know. I have several Magic mice, and I switched them between various computers often enough that I don't know which computer the broken one came with. The oldest one is probably from 2016.
I have several Magic Mice, including the one that still runs on the battery. I never had any of the batteries going bad - my oldest one is 5 years old at least still goes like a month on a charge.
