For what it's worth, I don't think Steve Jobs would have ever allowed the charging port for the Magic Mouse to ever be on the bottom and forced the user to have to leave the mouse on it's side to charge.
He's using the design to make you use it wirelessly (the way he wants). You're not supposed to use it like a normal mouse. The fact people moan about this would even make him more sure about it..
Also it came out back when and he probably saw it and approved it
I can imagine customers using the wireless mouse with the cable attached is something that would grind Steve's gears as well. Preventing the situation with a flipped tortoise design is a Steve thing to do.
You say this as if it's absolutely typical of Steve Jobs. I read it and think exactly the opposite. Jobs was certainly a stickler for aesthetics, but also for usability. I've read numerous accounts of him lashing out when he found a workflow noticeably frustrating.
What decisions made during Jobs's tenure would you consider comparable to the Magic Mouse's charging port?
Their keyboards got progressively worse as well.
Another great example was the iBooks that soaked up skin oils and became gross and disgusting.
During Jobs's tenure? The 2010-era Apple Bluetooth Keyboard is actually my favorite keyboard to type on. I'm currently using one I tracked down on eBay after my original finally broke.
> Another great example was the iBooks that soaked up skin oils and became gross and disgusting.
That's a long term problem. It's not the same type of general workflow issue that Jobs was really good at identifying.
Ugh. I absolutely hated that keyboard. Felt like tapping on a slab of granite all day long.
* The mouse supports fast charging - 2mins on the charger gives you all day use.
* A full charge will give you more than 2mo of battery life - nearly 3.
* In 24 months, you will have to put it on the charger between 6 and 8 times TOTAL.
With that context, the design makes perfect sense for a wireless mouse.
I tried a wireless keyboard once and every 10 minutes it would hang and repeat the last key I pressed for 10 seconds. How much better is the situation today?
I started using Apple wireless peripherals over a decade ago and haven’t experienced anything like what you describe once. I remember PC peripherals doing that kind of thing in the 90s though, back before everything switched to Bluetooth and everything used proprietary IR dongles etc.
I think their argument for the charging port on the bottom is because they didn't want people to be able to use it plugged in (so people wouldn't just leave it plugged in), it was intentional.
“We were going to put that model into a box so people wouldn’t see it.” Farag said.
Jobs darted right for the unfinished one saying, “That’s genius…We don’t want to have any buttons,” according to Farag.
As one would expect, someone from the design team quickly jumped up and agreed with Jobs as if that was one of the options all along."
https://www.techspot.com/news/55958-how-a-misunderstanding-w...
As far as not thinking about a button to click - that only works if the idea of 'right-click' doesn't exist. In the real world where it does now you just have to know to control-click, which seems strictly worse.
> As far as not thinking about a button to click - that only works if the idea of 'right-click' doesn't exist.
Well, when you adjust your timeline back to when that first one-button mouse came out in 1984, one can argue whether the idea of right-click as we know it today really existed! There were multi-button mice already, but there wasn't any standardization as to what the buttons did, so Apple's insistence on "there is just one button and it does THE THING" was at least defensible. And IIRC early versions of Windows pretty much ignored anything but the left button, although applications could receive clicks from them. I'm pretty sure the "right-click for a context menu" idea that's become standard today actually started with OS/2.
> In the real world where it does now you just have to know to control-click, which seems strictly worse.
Or you could just right-click. :) Every mouse Apple has sold since 2005 supports right-clicking (and OS X actually supported right-clicking from the start if you plugged in somebody else's mouse!). Their trackpads lets you click with two fingers for a right-click effect.
Fair point that when this started the right click menu wasn’t super established. That said, at some point it was, probably more than 20 years ago.
Today the Magic Mouse supports right click, but is still a bad mouse in my (and many others) opinion. It’s form over function. The Magic Trackpad is great though.
I’m about as big an Apple fan as exists so this isn’t some tribal argument. It’s just not a good design and I think they do it because multi-click mice look ugly. They pretend it’s for other reasons with some rationalized explanation, but in the mouse case I don’t think it is.
Big retailers don't like Bluetooth mouses because they have huge returns from them.
Usually they will place a few unconspiciously in the corner, but otherwise give most of shelf space to non-bt mouses.
Why so? People can't freaking press the PAIR button, even if you slap a big red sticker on it.
This is also the reason retailers insist on having batteries inserted into the mouse at factory, or have internal batteries charged to full before shipping.
They are getting ridiculous.
I like MX mouses better, but none of the mice on the market has... horizontal scrolling. Horizontal, true, scrolling.
The Mac didn't support context menus (control-click) until MacOS 8 in 1997 (13 years after the original Mac), and even then it was solely for shortcuts, and never for required functionality (unlike on Windows where some apps locked features behind that button)
All Apple input devices sold today support an alternative click (two finger tap on touch devices)
Look at the “puck“ for example.
I should better describe it as "controlled-flicking": kinetic energy is imparted onto the mouse via the fingers - not the palm - but the mouse never loses finger contact.
Do you not type with your right hand?
The real issue is the horrible sensor and tracking. It is absolutely unusable as a mouse.
Something you use 8 hours a day should first of all be pleasant to use and reduce the risk of long term damage to your wrist (carpal tunnel syndrome or similar).
I've never found the Magic Mouse uncomfortable to use. I generally use a trackpad anyway. I value that it's portable, looks nice, and works great with OS X. To each their own.