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Comment by arbitrage | Hacker News Reader

What's the expected lifetime of a mouse, and what's the expected useable lifetime of a li-ion battery? Yes, it will degrade over time, but you'll continue to get use out of it. I'd peg both at about 4-5 years at this point.

It's not apple that's implementing planned obsolescence. It's the entire industry, and it's defacto obsolescence. Or would you still expect to be using your microsoft ball mouse from 1999 today?

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I have an Microsoft Intellimouse from 2001 that I'm still using as my daily mouse at work.

It works flawlessly, and has all the features I want and nothing more. Mouse wheel with click and detents, back/forward buttons and left/right buttons.

I have a fancier mouse at home with a similar feature set and even though it cost 4x as much, sometimes my work mouse feels better.

Seriously a Logitech wireless mouse costs £8 here in the UK at the moment. It takes one AA battery a year for me and lasts about 3-4 years before the buttons stop working.

So not the entire industry.

As a side note I have a working Microsoft optical mouse from 1999 that was used for 7 years and is still fine.

If its still fine, why did you buy the logitech?

Bought a new desk and the cable was too short.

I think I have a trackball upstairs in a box from circa 2000 that I suspect still works fine, with an ADB-USB converter.

The design goals of these two devices are different. Of course, it's perfectly fine for different devices to have different design goals. In fact, they should!

I still use my Logitech MX518 from ~2005. Works fine. The reviews on Amazon tell of many other people who used this mouse for a long time.

It almost killed me when mine broke earlier this year and I found out they don't make them anymore. Best mouse I've ever used, and its corpse still has a place of honor at the top of the pile of old hardware in my closet.

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