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Comment by Unklejoe | Hacker News Reader

Look at that beautiful replaceable battery :)

My Logitech G700s has a AA NiMH battery in an easily replaceable door, no need to open the mouse.

The battery still charges over USB if you have the mouse wired, and switches to wireless when that's unplugged.

I like it a lot, if you run the battery down you can just pop a new one in and put the dead one in the charger. But I assume the one they're using here gives them higher capacity, so it's a trade-off.

I don't think it's just the capacity but the power efficiency. G700s has a really low run time, something like a week per charge as a heavy user. The MX 2S can go about 2 months between chargers and the 3 should have an even better run time.

Hasn't been an issue for me, the cord lives on my desk and I just plug it overnight every couple of days. If I forget, grab a charged AA and swap it out.

They're both excellent mice, I really wish they would combine the best features of both:

- battery life of the mx master

- scrollwheel of the mx master

- multi device of the mx master

- bluetooth of the mx master

- gesture button of the mx master

- extra buttons of the g700

- data-over-usb of the g700

- AA battery support of g700

- on-device memory of g700

I switched from a G700s to an Elecom XGM20DL due to the G700s's poor battery life and terrible software (the Logitech gaming mouse drivers, at least on Mac OS, are dramatically worse than the mainstream mouse drivers). Unfortunately the build quality is pretty average, not as nice as the G700s was and nowhere near the MX Master series. It also doesn't have a built-in battery charger.

I never liked the thumb button layout on the MX Master 1 and 2, but on the 3 it looks a lot better, so I might give one a try even though it doesn't have the index finger page up/down buttons.

If you want better software you could give SteerMouse a try:

https://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/download.php

$20 purchase, but the 30 day demo should be enough to see if it works for you. I don’t know whether it will recognize all of the G700s’s buttons.

I’m just using the trackpad on Mac now, but I used SteerMouse back in the day and it was much better than the official drivers.

I'm actually using SteerMouse with the Elecom because it doesn't have first-party Mac drivers. I never did try it with the G700s - I was already through with that based on the battery life. But it may have helped. (I am guessing, though, that even if it could handle all the buttons it wouldn't support the DPI switching on the G700s.)

Might be able to set the DPI switching stuff with its on device memory, set the rest of the buttons as generic mouse buttons, and then use it with SteerMouse.

Would require temporary use of the official software to set this up.

But if battery life was the problem it wouldn’t fix that. I use mine at my desk so I just plug it in and don’t have that issue.

I have to say the battery on my 2 year old MX Master 2S is excellent, it needs charging about once a month. It has helpful LED battery indicators and a software warning - I've always had enough warning that it's never run flat, even though I give it basically no thought.

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