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My guess would be a monetary justification. After all you can't just have developers working on year old laptops and devices when you can make them buy new ones by making this one simple change.

The potential profit from that is a rounding error for Apple.

These kind of "conspiracy theories" for this or that what amounts to negligible money always make me cringe. Not that companies don't do shitty things for money. But they don't do things like that for negligible money compared to their other operations, especially since there are far more important reasons to do them...

The reason is platform coherence and control, and lock-step updates. To avoid cases like this:

https://segmentfault.com/a/1190000040213084/en

https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windo...

...and not the insignificant money that could be made from devs updating a laptop a little earlier (especially since you can trivially use a still supported 5-6 year old laptop anyway with the newest Apple OS, and you wouldn't see any major performance issue, except in cases like the Intel to ARM switching. So what would they gain? Developers forced not to use an 8 or 10 year old laptop? As if they would?).

You don’t have to buy a new laptop or phone to install a software update and start developing for the latest version of iOS / Mac OS.

It's probably the same as the technical justification for why Safari updates are bundled with iOS and not separate, why XCode only runs on macOS, why no other browsers are allowed on iOS, why macOS can't have separate scroll directions between mouse and touchpad and many many others. It's Apple's ecosystem, nobody is asking you, you're holding it wrong.

Scroll direction is because everyone needs a mouse that you have to turn upside down to charge

The meme about the Magic Mouse charging upside down is really silly. There's a real good reason to be like that and you charge it once a month.

In the case of Magic Mouse, there's really a case of holding it wrong too. People hold it wrong and thats why they also complain about the ergonomics.

Truly excellent but misunderstood product.

I've worked on mice before and frankly I have no clue what sort of technical requirement would lead to an upside down charging requirement and disabling the functionality in the meantime. Can you explain what that reason might be?

Also if most people can't just pick up the mouse and use it, it's a broken design. In my particular case, it's so much smaller than my palm that I'm sure any grip would result in RSI.

Simple, the front is not thick enough to accommodate a common port like USB or Lightning. If you put it on the sides, it defies the purpose.

Changing the design to accommodate a port in the front doesn't make sense because the primary function of the device is to act as a human-computer interface and optimising the design for that purpose is paramount, charging is not a primary function but something that we have to do with electronics and as a result having long battery life and short charging process is good enough solution(the battery lasts about a month, charging takes about 2 hours but will work for hours even with a few minutes or charging). Why would you compromise a design for something that needs to be done occasionally and can be done out of the service(i.e. at nigh, when not using it).

So put the port on the side where you aren't supposed to grip it. If we assume that being totally nonfunctional for a couple hours a month is acceptable, merely being a bit inconvenient for the same period is surely an improvement.

Also, we don't agree that the magic mouse is good human-computer interface because I'm starting from the position that causing physical pain automatically precludes it from that category. Another example of an interface in the same position is laser keyboards. They're also very cool designs, but the the fact that tapping on solid surfaces starts to hurt after awhile precludes them from being 'good' HCI.

You can't put it at the side, the cable will interfere with the keyborad or the laptop that is on the left and won't work at all for the left handed people.

I mean, if you really think that charging a few minutes a day or leave it charging overnight once a month is a deal breaker, simply don't buy it but this is not a bad design. It is very unrealistic to expect that the mouse will be used 24/7 every day forever. If you have this use case of using mouse 24/7 everyday, this must be some kind of industrial operation and obviously this mouse is not for you but for everyone else it's a non-issue.

Won't work at all for left-handed people, as opposed to now where it works for no one during the same period? Seems like an improvement, despite my doubts that it truly wouldn't work for left-handers.

Anyway, hopefully we can avoid wild mischaracterizations here. My expectation obviously isn't that things work 24/7 indefinitely. Think about how the typical user is going to discover that the battery is low. Either they'll get the notification just before it dies and have to charge it "soon" [1] or the mouse will simply die and force the matter. In some cases (think multi-user computer labs), the person who receives the notification and the person who has to charge the mouse might be two different people. I think it's reasonable to find waiting around on a mouse rather than whatever they were planning on doing irritating.

[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/254703/get-low-bat...

Sure, better notifications can help. Maybe once idle, can send a notification to the phone to make the user put it on charge overnight.

I had the occasion where the battery died by surprise. That’s why I keep repeating that the device works for hours after few minutes o charging, you don’t have to fully charge it before use.

A few observations here. The first: this product is an optional thing. There are many mice manufactured, they all work with Macs. I, personally, have a Kensington. The last Apple mouse I had possessed a tail, and was only okay, not, for instance, good.

The next one: the charge lasts a month to six weeks with normal use.

Next one after that: it's your unlucky day and you didn't idly think "oh, hey, I'll plug this in over lunch" on week three like a normal person. What you do is plug it in, and take a ten minute break. Everyone has ten minutes worth of things they can do. This gets you to a real break, and now you're good for another six months. Yes, I said months, just plug the damn thing in sometimes. Set yourself a reminder. Don't be a vegetable.

The amount of time you've dedicated to being irritated online about a product you don't use, is longer than the irritation a typical user of that product will experience the entire time they own it.

Congratuations, I guess.

This would be a very different forum if the only things we discussed were the bare necessities of life.

Anyways I'm not irritated. This conversation was started because I asked what the good reasons behind obvious design issues are. So far the conversation has been about how you can work around them. That's great, but not the point.

It doesn't matter how large the battery is - at some point, someone forgets to charge. With any other mouse, you plug it into the charger and continue to use it while it's charging.

>Simple, the front is not thick enough to accommodate a common port like USB or Lightning

Well, that's the broken design part.

>Changing the design to accommodate a port in the front doesn't make sense because the primary function of the device is to act as a human-computer interface and optimising the design for that purpose is paramount

There's nothing about HCI that prevents a different design.

In fact, the Magic Mouse is one of the least ergonomically optimized mice out there...

> Simple, the front is not thick enough to accommodate a common port like USB or Lightning.

Then fire Jony Ive and make the front thicker! This isn't exactly rocket surgery.

It certainly can have separate scroll directions between (in my case) trackball and touchpad. You have to download a free menubar widget to get it, but so what.

This is in contrast to focus follows mouse, which you really can't do, and I wish it weren't so. In general though? The OS provides a lot of affordances for automation and customization, it exposes some of that through preferences and leaves the rest for developers.

A good example is what you can do to the keyboard from System Preferences (which is quite a bit) vs. what you can do using Karabiner.

>I wonder what is the technical justification for it too, if any.

Well, apps using it get a uniform look, that uniformly changes when the OS look is updated so that it matches it, and more importantly, they and also get to have the same widgets and widget functionality [1].

Unlike, say, Windows where you have 20 generations of MS GUI lib versions, with different looks and behavior, running at the same time, even from MS apps themselves...

[1] Yes, Apple has its share of inconsistencies (e.g. Swift UI vs regular Cocoa UI). But nothing like what would have resulted if they allowed apps with different historical macOS UI libs/versions to be installed at the same time independently from the OS UI libs.

Good point actually.

Windows also ships many of those generations of GUI libs with the OS. Your Win11 install will have user32.dll, VB6, WinForms, WPF, and WinRT (might also have MFC, not sure about that one). This is completely orthogonal to look-and-feel.

>This is completely orthogonal to look-and-feel.

Not completely orthogonal, as several different generations of MS GUI APIs implement different look and feels.

And bundling it with the OS means devs aren't forced to update their apps to the new APIs. It also makes it impossible for MS to automatically switch the look and feel (they could try for trivial things, but they wouldn't be able to properly accomondate old UIs based on pixel positions, nor would they be able to offer many of the new features given older widget designs).

https://segmentfault.com/a/1190000040213084/en

https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windo...

They can ship security updates themselves, which immediately fix all apps. Otherwise apps eventually never update.

Also apps don't get the new "improved" styles etc if they don't have it in the system, which takes away the consistency Apple aims for.

And then: It's Apple ...

Style changes and quickly become usability and accessibility issues. I'd rather my app continues to work well as I tested it, than having to test all of the shit on every other OS patch.

I hope you don’t apply the same philosophy to security patches.

In what world would security critical parts affect the UI. What does my ui care if the system libcurl changes? Swiftui is a ui framework, keep that stuff separate

A UI library does a lot of text processing, often with data coming from external sources. Lots of potential for buffer overflows etc.