No question about it, wireless is the GOAT.
It's very well possible my wireless mouse setup has lower latency than most wired setups.
That’s why I said essentially no lag. A good gaming wireless mouse will do better than many wired mice. In those cases it’s better but it’s still not enough difference to matter to anyone.
The advantage of wired is not just aesthetics. This thread started because of any accessory to deal with the wire. I don't need to bother at all with a damn wire in the way.
> This might as be considered a law of physics - electromagnetic energy will always travel faster, more accurately, with less interference, with less required current through a conductive medium than through air.
I mean you might want to go back and read a high school physics textbook - because you’ve got the speed of light exactly backwards.
The reason digital wireless signals may have additional latency has nothing to do with the propagation which is faster in air.
Also I’ve never seen a networking over powerline system that worked better than Wi-Fi. Not all conductive paths are effective for signals.
> Wired is ALWAYS the objectively superior option in all metrics except for superficial & subjective "aesthetics", all else equal.
Which is why professional musicians and broadcasters would never use wireless microphones and pickups. (sarcasm)
Also griefing about battery seem like horseshit too. I have a travel mouse with a single rechargeable AA battery in it. I have a variety of gaming mice, including a Razer Naga Epic from ~2010 that I've literally worn the buttons through to unreliability on. These mice all have li-ion batteries and they all work fine. Maybe in aggregate I've worn through like a single rechargable AA cells worth of use over a decade. The rate of attrition on rechargeable batteries is tiny.
It's just incredible what the cables-or-die undead-alliance goes through to justify their fanatical anti-cause.
Slower? Not really, not according to the links already shared. Less bandwidth? My headphones, my mouse, my keyboard are nowhere near their practical limits over wireless. Higher latency? I just cited 0.2ms, which seems absurd to grumble over. Higher error rate? This is not a problem I've ever experienced. More prone to interference? Literally never seen an issue. There's just no real solid reports on this being an issue. It's not seen with any statistical significance in real reviews.
Higher power requirements? Yes, having some awareness of batteries is required, but if you set things up (slash most devices are set up) to not be caught unprepared it's a remarkable low-toil system. Most devices can charge themselves. Most will operate for a week without charge. The only problem is being a total newb who doesn't have any handle at all, who gets caught out unprepared in the cold, by having absolutely no indicators & no warning. Once you actually start trying to use these devices, once you actually start looking at the battery level, the power concern is remarkably low issue.
Nobody said you can’t use your damn wired mouse if it makes you happy - but latency is not an actual reason to prefer a wired mouse.
> Again, wireless can be superior, but only when you are deliberately cherry-picking the least efficient wired setup to compare to the most efficient wireless setup, just like your argument for mice.
But earlier I thought you said it was a law of physics that conductive mediums were always superior to air. Also that the speed of light in air is slower than a “conductive” medium.
You don’t seem well.
Yes they are. “The terms light, electromagnetic waves, and radiation all refer to the same physical phenomenon: electromagnetic energy.”
https://science.nasa.gov/ems/02_anatomy
Light and radio are both electromagnetic energy. Radio waves and light both propagate at the speed of light. The speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. The speed of light in various mediums is always slower. Among copper, air and glass, light/EM waves will propagate the slowest in glass and the fastest in air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
> cannot make use of light through air even a fraction as efficiently as light through fiber optic cable, due to a guaranteed minimum amount of light interference in air that a fiber optic cable will never have, right?
No, not right. As someone else pointed out a point to point link through the air will have lower latency than fiber (glass or plastic).
Whether or not a signal can be carried accurately and error free through any medium involves concepts beyond a basic understanding of the speed of light. But in the real world one will encounter reliable well designed wireless links and poorly performing wired links.
There's a clear misunderstanding here.
Light and wireless signals used by mice etc are the same thing though, just at a different frequency. They propagate at the same speed, the speed of light, which ironically is slower in glass.
Wireless signals in air travel faster than light in a fiber optic cable (and faster than electricity in copper).
although I agree that powerline networking is garbage, I have encountered older construction houses that create an environment that is just about impossible to conquer without specialist wireless equipment.
passive blocking via exotic wall materials, older drywall and fairing compounds that contained metallic particulate, various metallic accoutrements -- and accidental active jamming from poor wiring.
>Which is why professional musicians and broadcasters would never use wireless microphones and pickups. (sarcasm)
eh -- this is just an effective and allowed compromise. A performer will usually prefer not to drag wires around a stage just from the sheer physical discomfort from the additional weight and the worry of a trip hazard on an already hazardous stage.
That said , many performers opt to avoid such conveniences due to a perceived difference in quality. [0]
[0]: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-wireless-rigs-not-the-standard...
eh — this is not a “purely” aesthetic or superficial difference, which was the foolishness I was replying to: “Wired is ALWAYS the objectively superior option in all metrics except for superficial & subjective "aesthetics", all else equal.”
I've never seen it go beyond 200mbps for any real run I've had. Often the link in these shitty big row-houses I've lived in has resulted in more like ~40mbps. Those numbers sound awful. But I'll take it any day, in these wifi noisey spaces. Having reliable <2ms latency with absolutely no drop outs has been an absolutely killer advantage. The powerline networking has so much less variability, so much less jitter & chaos than wifi, even very complex multi-drop wifi. I might get more throughput over wifi, but it comes with far far higher base latency, and will fall to shit multiple times a day. Powerline's reliability has been one of the best upgrades I've ever made.
it actually travels faster through air (no vacuum necessary) than through fiber or copper as those transmit information at 2/3rd of the speed of light while air transmits it at 99% [1].
which is why starlink could in theory achieve better latency than a straight run of fiber optic across the world [2].
this of course doesn't mean that it's better in a mouse because of the overhead of processing such a short distance.
[1] https://archive.is/c859M [2] https://youtu.be/QEIUdMiColU?t=238
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/priva...
could you provide more info? the source I gave you has a real-world example of a wireless link used over fiber to achieve better latency.
Parent has edited all their comments now making the rest of the comment tree less useful. Essentially they were arguing that wireless signals themselves couldn't be faster than a wired/optical signal despite physics disagreeing.
Let's be honest here, you clearly have never used a decent or good wireless mouse, and have little or no knowledge of the marketplace (and oddly have a lot of opinions about them...)
> Having to change batteries several times a year is objectively more expensive, wasteful, worse for the environment, and burdensome than never having to change batteries.
Rechargeable batteries (either built-in li-ion or nimh AAA/AA) exist. Before you start going on about the inconvenience of charging: when I see my mouse dock's LED ring glowing orange as opposed to a more greenish color, I know I've got a couple of hours before I should go through the incredibly arduous process of...placing it on the dock for a bit.
> Wired is ALWAYS the objectively superior option in all metrics except for superficial & subjective "aesthetics", all else equal.
Not having a cord is substantially nicer from a usability and feel standpoint, and not just for gaming.
> "Essentially no lag" is objectively not the same as "no lag".
Go look at rtings or any other site that reviews mice, and you'll see that just like wired mice, wireless mice can vary in latency, but there are plenty of mice (even non-gaming ones) with latency matching or so close to wired mice it's within the realm of measurement error and the difference could not possibly matter even in competitive gaming.
You have a lot of opinions about wireless mice for someone who clearly has never used one.
I do personally agree that unstandardized batteries are a problem in wireless mice as eventually you'll be unlikely to find an exact replacement, but I think there can be plenty of wins from wireless. No cable drag (annoying!), no cable running across the desk (I can stow my mouse in a drawer in less than a second to clear my desktop), and I don't have to worry about the cable fraying over time (legitimately something that happened with my razer years ago!)