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Comment by bbx | Hacker News Reader

Can't really agree with the Magic Mouse 2 being a "miss". I understand the controversy with the charging port being under the mouse, but it's done on purpose: Apple wants to prevent users from leaving the mouse connected with a USB cable all the time. Maybe there was a better solution to this issue, but the truth is that it's not actually an issue and not a blunder either. I've had this mouse for years and simply recharge it every few months overnight.

Scrolling without a wheel took a bit of learning, but in the end, being able to seamlessly move vertically and horizontally with a single finger is highly useful in design or music software. I haven't seen a mouse that could handle it as well as the Magic Mouse.

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> I understand the controversy with the charging port being under the mouse, but it's done on purpose: Apple wants to prevent users from leaving the mouse connected with a USB cable all the time.

Here's a better solution: good old rechargeable AA batteries. Keep a spare set sitting in a charger, and you'll never need to wait for your device to recharge.

If you're concerned about users falling back on disposables, bundle two sets of rechargeable AA's and a charger. Apple used to sell branded versions of these items.

I hate built-in rechargeable batteries for peripherals like mice, keyboards, and game controllers.

Any even better solution, use a wired mouse and keyboard. Why do I need to deal with batteries for something that doesn't move more than a few inches from its destination? We've banned wireless peripherabls in our organization, because they cause more issues then they are worth. "My mouse is jumping all over the screen", "my mouse no longer works", "my keyboard is typing things I'm not typing!". 9/10 it's low battery, the other 1/10 is someone has paired accidentally with your machine.

I don't like wired mice for the same reason I wouldn't want to use a wired Wii Remote. I use my mouse by physically moving it around my desk, and I find the tug of a physical cable to be distracting.

I can't say I've ever had tracking issues with the Magic Mouse either. I certainly don't have any with the wireless Logitech G305 I use now, which was designed for gaming and feels particularly precise and responsive.

If we were talking about keyboards, I'd be more sympathetic to your viewpoint. Although even then, I like the clean look of my wireless keyboard, even if it means I have to swap batteries once every couple months.

As an engineer who works with smaller parts, my desk and work areas have a constant influx of parts and pieces- and the keyboard and mouse I use take up a lot of space- like two square feet- and being able to move them, rest them on top of stuff, and use the mouse on my leg as necessary is really useful, and I really don't want to go back to wired peripherals.

Similarly, I really like Thunderbolt docks and the like because it helps me cut down on the semi-permanent wire clutter on my desk.

I personally love my apple mouse, they did a great job with it

How about a Qi certified mouse and mouse pad?

What's the point of AA and AAA when lipo already has months of battery life, better weight and weight distribution and don't have to deal with finding/charging batteries, battery recycling all the time, gunk from unequal cell discharge etc. It's so much easier to just plug on a USB cable for all of 2 minutes.

2-3 years later when your proprietary LiPo dies, you'll pat your younger self on the back for choosing a standardised battery. You will repeat this over and over again for every time you choose a standardised power source over a proprietary one.

These batteries last months, at the standard 500 cycle's that's about a decade's worth of regular use.

2 minutes is 2 minutes too long. I don’t want to sit and wait while my mouse recharges.

(Yes, swapping batteries tajes some amount of time, but so does finding and plugging in a cable, so that’s a wash as far as I’m concerned.)

Ergonomically it is a disaster. I can’t think of a single product that embodies design over function more than this mouse.

All of Apples mouse designs have been absolute train wreaks since the horrible “puck” mouse on the original iMac.

The Mighty Mouse wasn't so bad. The ball would get dirty and need to be cleaned occasionally, but you could kind of clean it without taking it apart (flip it upside down and rub it on paper), but you could also take the mouse apart to clean it more thoroughly.

The ball in my Mighty Mouse died after 6 months of use. I tried cleaning the ball but it didn't fix it. Opening the mouse broke it because it wasn't really designed to be opened. Terrible experience for a pretty expensive mouse.

I have a 10 year old Logitech mouse that still works perfectly fine.

The Magic Mouse 2 is junk but not because of the location of the charge port or the touch scroll. It's because it got the fundamentals of good mice so bad—an unergonomic shape and abysmally high foot friction. There are obviously going to be people who love it, but for me it's embarrassingly bad compared to options made by Razer and others.

Yet their trackpad is the best in the entire industry. I've switched to the Magic Trackpad on my desktop and it's brilliant. The impetus to change was concern for some occasional RSI-like pain in my left-click finger, but now that I've been using it for a couple of years, I don't miss the traditional mouse at all.

I used to use the original Magic Mouse at work, which used AA batteries instead of a stupid lighting port to recharge.

I came to appreciate the Magic Mouse quite a bit. I found it perfectly comfortable, and having what is effectively a super long scroll wheel is great. I also appreciated the easy horizontal scrolling, and the ability to switch spaces with swipe gestures.

I switched only because I discovered how nice the tracking quality of gaming mice is.

Same here. I still don't have a good solution to horizontal scrolling (shift doesn't work in Excel).

The Macbook trackpad has by far the best horizontal scrolling of any pointing device. I could not live without it. (If anyone knows a better solution please tell me. I'm always looking for new options.)

It's great for spreadsheets. I even use the Macbook trackpad for 3D CAD. I used to use a spaceball and mouse, but the trackpad plus modifier keys is more convenient because it keeps the hands to the keyboard.

In the event that you'd prefer a mouse for standard pointing, I do think the Magic Mouse is equally good at horizontal scrolling. One could quibble that the Magic Mouse offers less room on the surface for horizontal movement, but in practice I don't think this makes much difference.

Best of both worlds—

I know many people that use a mouse and Magic Trackpad and fluidly switch between them depending on the task. I did exactly that for about a year—before eventually ditching the mouse altogether.

The problem with belly-up charging is that it's ridiculous quite literally. Maybe usable, but ridiculous, that is all.

I think a docking/charging station for the mouse would be more elegant and nice to have, though more expensive too of course.

Even a docking station would suffer from the same problem because people would just put the mouse onto the dock every time they were done using it. Also, I don't think contact charging is as fast as cable charging. The point is to only charge it when you absolutely need to.

> people would just put the mouse onto the dock every time they were done using it

That's still so much better than using with the cable attached (if it was possible), or the belly-up charging.

... but why does that matter?

Part of the reason the Magic Mouse was a miss in my mind was that the Magic Trackpad was so much better. For how awkward the magic mouse was at first, the magic trackpad felt natural at first touch.

I remember getting one at work, this was the only time I liked a product at work so much that I immediately picked one up before coming home.

There’s also a ton of general mice that work great.

I love my Magic Trackpad up until it starting killing my wrists. A Magic Mouse let me be pain-free again.

> Apple wants to prevent users from leaving the mouse connected with a USB cable all the time.

Why should that be a problem?

Because how dare the end-user do anything Apple does not approve of?

My guess is to prevent images of it out in the wild looking like a non-magical normal mouse with wires

Because that will wreck the battery capacity.

Li-Ion batteries aren’t designed for that use-case.

Also the Magic Mouse has fast charging. You’ll get a full day of battery in 2min.

With a full charge, you’ll get 2+ months of usage.

Do the math. You’ll most likely charge this thing less than 20 times in it’s entire life.

That’s why the battery port design is both really smart and elegant. Unfortunately people don’t take the time to understand the purpose of design choices and jump to the easiest meme that reinforces their beliefs.

Is it not possible to disable battery usage completely using circuitry if connected by wire? Draw and use all power from the cable? What impact could that possibly have on the battery? I imagine it'd be similar to keeping a mouse unused.

>Also the Magic Mouse has fast charging. You’ll get a full day of battery in 2min.

> With a full charge, you’ll get 2 months of usage.

> Do the math. You’ll most likely charge this thing less than 20 times in it’s entire life.

These things don't make sense as a whole.

Why put a fast charger in (to get your day's worth of charging) if your use case is "charge it to full, get 2 months", so you "likely charge this thing less than 20 times in its life"?

Most likely, you'll go to one extreme or the other, and I think the "less than 20 in its life" is entirely optimistic, and based on a use case that the design doesn't represent.

A full charge to 100% takes longer.

Fast charging is more intensive on the battery - you don't want it to be running on fast charge the whole time.

It's for scenarios where you might forget to charge or it's been sitting unused for a while but you still want to get to work quickly. It minimizes failure scenarios.

It's meant to be a wireless mouse. Emphasis on wireless.

You are assuming that when plugged the mouse would run from the battery, which quite frankly would be a terrible decision.

The mouse is designed to never need wires except for charging. The solution is to minimize charge time, not add more features to let you use it in a wired fashion; that's regressive.

It actually works really well. I still don't like the mouse because my hands are big and the ergonomics are absolutely terrible for me, but the charging design is well considered.

I've never understood why companies force the battery to charge the whole time it's plugged in for things that charge quickly and discharge slowly.

If a full charge lasts 2 months, then why keep it topped up while plugged in? Just charge it to 85%, then let it discharge to 50%, then charge it again. The circuit to do this can't be that hard to design.

So my understanding is that all Li-Ion batteries come with circuitry that explicitly keeps track of the battery condition and minimizes charging when unnecessary, even if it's plugged in. I don't think it's just "juice goes in until it's full"

Can anyone more knowledgeable confirm?

Usually that just means it lets the charge level drop to ~98% or something before topping it off again which I'm sure they do but having doing anything with a lipo slowly kills it to some degree including simply being near high and low states of charge so it's no silver bullet.

What they would need to do is detect when the port has been has been connected regularly for days and let the charge level drop to some announcement proportionate to the frequency and duration.

Ignorant comment. Very easy to design a) a dual power circuit and b) charging hysteresis to not mame the battery.

There simply is no good reason for the port placement.

I was wondering if that was the decision. it is well known that apple products should not constantly stayed plugged in and I think putting the charging cable in this location allowed for the battery on the mouse to stay consistent over time.

If it'd been on the edge I'd have probably used it plugged in all the time, because I've been trained by years and years of shitty battery-powered peripherals to plug them in any time I possibly can. Turns out it's totally fine and the battery lasts ~forever, and since I couldn't plug it in I didn't stress about it.

> it is well known that apple products should not constantly stayed plugged in

I've never heard this before. What's the explanation? Is it related to battery health? Why does it only apply to Apple products?

I love the Magic Mouse. What’s amazing is how long the batteries in Apple’s wireless mouse and keyboard peripherals last on a single charge.

I work remote and visit my office ~ twice per month. Nearly every time I show up to my desk, the mouse is dead, and I have to work without a mouse while it charges. IMO the Razer mouse I use at home is better in every respect.

> Apple wants to prevent users from leaving the mouse connected with a USB cable all the time.

This happens a lot with Apple. Good, bad or otherwise, they constantly solve customer issues when the customer isn't really having an issue.

I developed terrible tendinitis in my fingers using the Magic Mouse within a few weeks of purchasing one, I've never had a peripheral cause me so much pain in my career.

Are you still experiencing pain? I had terrible tendonitis from playing too much chess using crappy trackpads in college lol. Took using https://www.amazon.com/Evoluent-VM4R-VerticalMouse-Ergonomic... this for a few years to fix my hands. Now I'm fine using the macbook trackpad all day.

I had that happen with the original Microsoft Ergonomic Mouse. The Magic Mouse has been fine. In fact it's my favourite mouse design ever, and I absolutely love the touch surface.

The bottom charging is kludgey, and there was probably a more elegant solution. But you only need to charge the mouse once ever couple of months, so it's not a huge problem.

However, I would guess my hands are not the same size as your hands. You don't have to be a design genius to understand there's a ton of variation in hand size, and one-size-fits-all products don't.

A genius product would be a resizable mouse with an auto-resizing guide to help you pick the right size and curve for your hand size and grip style.

Apple demonstrated that this was an incomplete design effort by releasing the rechargable track pad that can be left plugged in.

Having switched to PC recently one of the few things I miss is the amazing magic mouse / mac drivers combo.

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