The magic mouse is so much better than any other mouse I've used (because the scrolling is so much better) and the charge port being on the bottom has not been an issue a single time over multiple years.
Aesthetically the mouse is great, very beautiful, especially for the time it came out.
The design of the mouse is amazing in several ways, but very lacking in others, specifically ergonomics and charging. In fact, had they made the mouse larger, in all dimensions, they could have solved two birds with one stone. The mouse is too small to comfortable use for most people, making it larger would fit the human hand better and decrease the amount of contortion your hand has to do to use it. And with this extra height they could have put a charging port on the front! Win win on the design side of things!
There are several products you can buy that help with this, I have both wings and a palm bump added to my magic mouse that makes it much more comfortable. I tried to take one apart once to explore making a new case for it that addresses some of these concerns, but I ended up breaking it.
I think that final bit really is the crux, the scrolling and gesture support is so good I'm sufficiently motivated to try and solve the problems with the mouse. A beautifully flawed product.
On point. People too often confuse aesthetics with design.
Be as pedantic as you want, but aesthetics is an aspect of design, not exclusive to it.
If I say "the world was not the most important aspect of the policy, _USA_ was", then that does not imply that USA is not part of the world.
(and these days when everything else is USB-C, instead I'm scrambling to find where my damn lightning cable has gone)
Although I get why they would not put the port on the back - their Lightning cables are not built for the repeated motion/strain of a plugged-in mouse. Anything more strain than plugging your phone in and setting it down causes the cables to break down in months.
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The keyboard has 3-5x the battery life of the trackpad. Not sure how they can be similar to the mouse if they’re not even similar to each other.
...I still prefer my Logitech mouse that works plugged in though.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/25/unnecessary-inventions-magic-...
Was this never even considered an issue? As in, did it just never get considered as something bad? Did it never get focus grouped in a wide enough range of users for someone to question this? Was it noticed, questioned, decided it was works as intended?
It just seems like with a company the size of Apple who all work under draconian NDAs, why not have an internal employee focus group? Hubris of the design silos?
We may disagree—I think that surely there must have been some way of solving the problem—but it seems very unlikely to me that they missed it.
They just exercised judgement that I think was suboptimal.
Of course, they are selling millions of products and making billions of dollars doing it, so not sure I can claim I’m unambiguously right.
That’s the theory. In practice, charging it whilst getting a coffee gives it enough battery life to finish the day. Sure, you need to remember to charge it then. But you never have to chose between using it or charging it for more than a couple of minutes in the real life.
It's a stupid location for a charge port but the battery lasts for several weeks if not months; it's just not that much of an issue in real world use.
In my experience, this is exactly why it's an issue.
All my less tech savvy family who use this mouse forget to charge it because "it never needs charging" ... and then it runs out of juice whilst they are in the midst of something and now they can't use the mouse.
I have no idea how this is a problem for anyone.
My Magic Mouses battery only lasts for 5 to 10 minutes... if I could use it while plugged in I could still use it. As it is I can just toss it.
People who don't like pink bags don't buy pink bags.
Unless you use any application that requires more or less precise scrolls. Like any game, or any map in the browser. The experience of using Google maps / Apple maps / Openstreetmap with Magic Mouse is unbelievably shitty. Almost every time I want to make a click it interprets it as a scroll and zooms in or out. I eventually replaced magic mouse because of this with a regular mouse when I use an Apple computer, and it is much much better.
Sure, the iconic designs of the G4 Cube, iMac, metal Powerbooks and later Macbook were what drew people in, but the usability is what kept many people with Apple.
Is the better scrolling a design or a tech thing? Probably tech, but I'm sure it's only that good because someone really understood how people use it and what it really needs to do well and then insisted that the tech worked flawlessly.
Design, from designare - to mark out, to prepare the plans for, especially to plan the form and structure of
Usability is just one area of emphasis for design. Apple simply included too few elements of usability in their efforts.
We may disagree, but the usability used to be and maybe is again the main selling (or at least "staying") point. I think this was lost a bit during Apple's "high design" years before Ives departure. It was often form over function.
So here's the rub, isn't it? Consumer mice from decades ago did NOT require you to check battery levels.
There's no good reason for a charging/wired port on the bottom of the mouse. It may only be a problem rarely, but it could just not be a problem AT ALL.
Of course, just thinking about using the Magic Mouse for FPS games hurts my wrists, so it in particular was never a real consideration anyhow :P
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.
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.
The sleep cycle of a mouse microprocessor is 99.9%+. A few minutes charge will get you hours of use.