I never remember to plug it in after I’ve finished my work and am ready to leave for lunch or for the day.
Short of putting a post-it note on my screen, I don’t think I ever will. My brain doesn’t work that way, and the point of technology is to support me, not for me to support technology.
Requiring users to perform their own async mental scheduling of a trivially forgettable pending task like “plug in the mouse” is bad design.
Perhaps some people have an innate ability to perform that kind of task scheduling without it being a significant cognitive load, but many others do not.
I think you must be exaggerating a little bit, because if true then it doesn't really matter if the charging port is on the bottom. You need a corded mouse. Apple doesn't make any, but I've yet to see any 3rd party USB mouse that a Mac won't work fine with. I've got a Logitech connected to a USB-C dongle for the infrequent times that I want a mouse on my MBP. Mouse+Dongle is also cheaper than a Magic Mouse.
I’m not exaggerating at all. I can try to drill “remember to plug in the mouse” into my head, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll forget.
The previous magic mouse worked fine; if I ran out of juice, I just swapped the batteries immediately and kept going.
If the current Magic Mouse supported charging while in use, I’d just do that. Problem solved.
The turtle-mode charging is a ridiculous design constraint for those of us for whom “remember this trivial and stupid task to be performed at some arbitrary later time” does not come at all naturally.
My (ridiculous) solution is two magic mice. When one dies, I swap it for the other. No cognitive load, no breaking flow — but it’s silly to have to keep a spare $99 mouse around to solve this problem.
My employer has plenty of spare magic mice floating around, or I’d probably just buy myself a Microsoft mouse that uses AA batteries.
So even if I'm at home where I (almost) always have batteries, this still involves going downstairs, digging a couple batteries out, and swapping them. (In an office I probably wouldn't have batteries handy.)
I won't defend a rechargeable mouse you can't use while plugged in; the Logitech mouse I generally prefer lets me do this. But just swapping batteries isn't clearly better than can't use a mouse while it's charging to me. And with a laptop I'm actually fine with using the built-in trackpad 90% of the time.
I always had batteries at my desk. Either way, an instant fix is preferable to “remember to do this later, and if you forget, your mouse dies at a most inconvenient time”.
Short of putting a post-it note on my screen, I don’t think I ever will. My brain doesn’t work that way, and the point of technology is to support me, not for me to support technology.
Requiring users to perform their own async mental scheduling of a trivially forgettable pending task like “plug in the mouse” is bad design.
Perhaps some people have an innate ability to perform that kind of task scheduling without it being a significant cognitive load, but many others do not.