The possibility to kill yourself in a Porsche still exists, the only thing stopping you are the ESC/DSC systems which are, in all likelyhood, not made by Porsche anyway but OEM from someone like Bosch.
Turn off the ESC and given the opportunity physics will still remind you who's boss in the Porsche.
Classic 50-50 distributed vehicles like a Miata or a 3 Series are very forgiving to control once you reach the limits of rear traction, which is part of the reason these vehicle are very popular for entry level motorsports.
I at least understand why Apple want a no-button mouse.
So the engine is behind you but in front of the rear wheels. This is generally thought to be optimal layout for a super car.
Porsche used the mid-engine layout for the 959 for example.
In fact, almost every car have a front or middle engine. The 911 is very unique in this rear placement layout.
It might be pretty rare though, like rear engines cars: hillman imp, Fiat 500, etc and of course vw microbus and beetle which rather brings us back to the 911
yeah, but then with that pedantry applied the Honda S2000, BMW 3 Series, Mazda Miata, and various other cars are technically mid-engine.
FR/MR/RR is basically useless to talk about with regards to performance dynamics; HPDEs and driver coaching has taught me that 9 times out of 10 when someone mentions where their engine is sitting in the car by using FR/MR/RR , what they're really trying to get across is where they felt their center-of-mass was during the drive.
And to that point, a Formula style car might be mid-engine, but most have a suspension and aero adjusted center-of-mass that is as aft, if not worse, than any Porsche out there.
They fact that they go very fast, and require more skill to drive at fast speeds means they end up killing more people. Porsche used to make incredible, no-compromise, road-legal track cars, with manual gearboxes and very little driver assist. But they’ve toned that down recently, and you’ll never see it from them again. The Porsche Carrera GT was probably the absolute pinnacle of supercar design. But it was very hard to drive, and got a reputation as one of the most dangerous production cars ever made. Killing quite a few people, including Paul Walker. Nobody will ever make anything like that ever again. A novice could take a Veyron around a track, but they’d probably struggle to drive a Carrera GT out of a car park.
WRT Porsche toning things down, a modern 911 turbo S is WAY faster than the Carrera GT was, and the GT3 / GT3-RS models are literally street legal road cars with minimal assists.
I’ve driven both, on the street and around a track. I’m not exaggerating to say the average stick driver would struggle to start a Carrera GT and driver it a hundred feet without making the clutch scream. If you try drive fast in one, whether you drive into a tree or not is completely up to you. In a GR3 however, it’s gonna do a significant amount of that work for you.
That's what makes the 911 a weird and unusual car.
Porsche have used rear (e.g. 911), mid (e.g. 959, 917, 956) and front (e.g. 928) engine layouts over time.
The 911 is iconic though and customers like its design so they've persevered with it.