Any company would be right to have a "low" opinion of their average user. Have you seen how the average person uses their computer?

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." -George Carlin

Having a specific vision for how your products will be used and designing them to be used that way doesn’t need to be portrayed as a low opinion of the customer.

I’m not sure you can really even say it’s a case of form over function. It looks silly, not cool or elegant.

Fortunately I welded the power of Emacs and was immune to their blandishments!

(actually of course in those days Emacs didn't run on the Mac. The ability to run Emacs convinced me to get a NeXT).

I think that's the exact scenario they tried to avoid. The lightning cable is actually pretty stiff, it won't take long for it to break if one could use it pluged in like a wired mouse.

I dislike most things Apple has done recently. But I can understand this one.

It's fine for the trackpad, designed and released together with the mouse, to have the lightning port on the back and be used plugged in, because it doesn't move so there shouldn't be much stress on the cable.

To be fair, that only happens if you ignore the warnings that should show up days before and aren’t willing to wait a minute for it to charge.

You go grab a cap of coffee and by the time you are back it is charged for the rest of the day. This is a perfect example of the problem which is more imagined than real. I'd bet most people making fun of this design never used the said mouse, and those who use it never found placement of the charging port to be an issue.