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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

I can only quote Steve in response to this silliness:

”Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Citing the mouse thing is a prime example of this silliness. First, it ignores that it doesn't matter whether the charging port is on the bottom, because that mouse cannot operate when it's plugged in. Second, it ignores that you can charge the thing in a few minutes, so, again, it doesn't matter that the port is on the bottom.

Only people who don't actually use an Apple Mouse think that this matters.

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But to be fair most wireless mice _do_ work just fine when plugged in, so the failure to make a mouse that for some reason can’t work while plugged in is also a part of their design.

Apple’s own wireless trackpad and wireless keyboards work while being plugged in.

I think the sleek visual and ergonomic design specifically resulted in the charge port being put on the bottom, which resulted in their decision to disable the mouse when it’s charging. Not the other way around.

Many people I know leave their trackpad and wireless keyboards plugged into the Lightning/USB ports all the time. This is basically fine for a keyboard or trackpad, since very little of the functionality of those devices benefits from mobility.

By contrast, a wireless mouse is fundamentally a different animal than a wired one. If (say) 90% of your users are going to leave it plugged in 100% of the time (to offset against the ~3 hours per year when they'll actually need to charge it), then a huge percentage of your users will experience an inferior product. It's like buying a mobile phone and then encouraging users to leave it plugged in by their bedside all day.

I’m not sure I understand this argument. Why can’t users simply use the mouse wirelessly even if it’s possible to use in a wired way. Are you claiming that people would end up leaving the mouse plugged in, like they do with the trackpad? If the point is that using a wireless mouse is a better experience, then why wouldn’t people use it wirelessly except to charge?

I have an Apple keyboard and trackpad that I use at my TV wirelessly but have benefited from the ability to use while charging a few times when the battery died. Doesn’t stop me from using it wirelessly 99% of the time because the experience is better.

By the way, I have an older phone I leave plugged in all the time by my bed, the battery life on it has deteriorated but it works perfectly for music.

> why wouldn’t people use it wirelessly except to charge?

For some users, the point of a wireless mouse is to be a portable mouse. You can take it on the go with your laptop without worrying about cables. When they are at home, they don't care about cable drag, and they want the peace of mind that the mouse will always have full battery when they need to go. They leave the mouse always plugged in when they can, so they can use the mouse unplugged when they need to.

I think most modern mouses have long enough battery life now, that more people can have the peace of mind without constantly docking their mouse. If the battery lasts weeks, it feels pretty secure.

By the same token, you could make it impossible to use your phone while it's charging, but that's rightly understood to be a terrible idea that's not even considered. Rechargeable game controllers pretty much all allow you to plug them in if you want while you use them, and in some cases to just drop the battery entirely and use them as wired. I recognize that neither of these are perfect analogs, mostly because both of these need to be charged much more often.

I can't really decide if the Magic Mouse thing was primarily an aesthetic decision to have no visible ports, or a decision that the user couldn't be trusted to use it "correctly" if it allowed itself to be plugged in normally, or an equal mixture of both. Either reinforces some typical Apple stereotypes which is why it keeps getting brought up even though it needs to be charged relatively rarely.

No one would assume that a mobile phone requires to be plugged in to work. With mice it is not as clear cut. And looking at my magic mouse, I wouldn't know where they would put a charge port without making its wireless use worse. So I prefer it as it is. Would be nice though, if wireless charging would be possible.

Yes, but to make one that works when plugged in takes some extra considerations and might cost a bit more

For example, having the port in front would change the overall design of the magic mouse, would mean that it would be thicker (at least in the front) and might also fight for space with the click switch

But yeah, given it charges to usable in a couple of minutes, it's a non-issue

In practice, there is no problem to be solved here. I have used a Magic Mouse for at least five years. It has never run out of juice while I’m using it, and I simply plug it in at lunch or overnight or on a Zoom call for a bit when I start getting notifications about the battery. It runs for three weeks of daily use without need for a charge.

Five years doesn't seem like a very long time. My intellimouse is 20 years old. The battery will never wear out because there is no battery.

> That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Which is exactly why many Apple fans had become so frustrated with bizarre "form over function" design in the waning Ive years. Even if the butterfly keyboard hadn't been vulnerable to making an entire computer unusable due to a tiny speck of dust, the "tapping on glass" feel of it was the prime example of "usefulness be damned" at the alter of Ive's bizarre obsession with thinness. If anything, the most recent MacBooks, where they just essentially undid all the bad decisions of the previous 3-4 years, were an admission that they had chased weird design obsessions at the cost of "it just works".

The other commenters have already pointed out the absurdity of a mouse that can't be used while it is charging.

I own a magic mouse 2. Honestly the charge port is the least of its problems. Apple does not like to put a second switch in their mice, so right clicking is done entirely in software and touch. The problem with this approach is that it's not possible to click both buttons at the same time, it also makes it harder to trigger because there's only 1 switch and it's on the left side. Plus it's just uncomfortable and has these plastic rails that make horizontal movement harder on some surfaces. It's just all around an awful mouse.

Apple has frequently ignored how it works for looks and still do. They would for the longest time stick all the USB ports on the left hand side of the laptop very close together such that a larger USB stick or a 3G dongle or whatever would block your only other port. They do things like awkwardly hide the power button on the back of iMacs, no fronting facing or side mounted ports, etc.

The magic mouse is by far my favorite mouse and I prefer it to the fancy Logitech MX I used before. No other mouse gets scrolling as right as the magic mouse does. Why would you want to be able to have a simultaneous left and right click? Be sure to check out BetterTouchTool to set up more guestures for the mouse, like a 3 and a 4 finger click.

> Why would you want to be able to have a simultaneous left and right click?

Video games.

Chording mouse clicks was common on machines at PARC and on lispms, long before the Macintosh was even designed.

You can do that with the magic mouse, you can have separate settings for 1,2,3,4 finger clicks, equally for swipes with 1-4 fingers.

What do you like about the scrolling? It's not IMO better than a free scrolling wheel and you don't get the ability to have ratcheted scrolling which is handy for scrolling through drop down boxes or anywhere where you need to scroll an integer number of times.

You need both mouse clicks at the same time to play pretty much any modern FPS and many other types of video games. When a dollar store mouse can do it I kind of expect an $80 one can. Ratcheted scrolling also helps there. There's probably other applications that need it.

I shouldn't have to spend money on a third party app to fix an $80 mouse.

Because it scrolls both in y as well as in x direction. A lot of software supports more than one scroll direction. The magic mouse makes that a very natural swipe across the surface.

With BTT, I can define all kind of guestures on the mouse (some of it can be defined with the MacOS settings, but BTT gives even more freedom). 1-4 finger clicks, 1-4 finger swipes, you name it. No other mouse offers this.

For gamers, I probably wouldn't recommend the magic mouse, though I am fine with it for StarCraft. But for all other tasks, I just love it.

So your argument against the bottom charger beign bad design is that the mouse is also designed so it can’t charge and operate (contrary to the keyboard for example)? That’s kind of circular :)

I know plenty of apple ecosystem centric people who used an apple mouse and hated that design. So much so they gave up and got another one eventually. It’s clearly a bad design because there is an obvious alternative with no downsides.

A better example though might be the mess that is the design, or rather lack thereof, of the notification system and haphazard gesture meanings in iOS. I use both a Pixel Android and an iPhone, but mainly the iPhone these days and it’s clear that Apple don’t get everything right.

>Design is how it works.

But the design of having the charge port not on the bottom would not negatively affect how it works. In fact, the port on the bottom goes against "how it works" philosophy.

> Only people who don't actually use an Apple Mouse think that this matters.

I use one (several, actually — that’s what work provides) and I absolutely think this matters.

I forget to charge it. I don’t check the battery level. I don’t remember to plug it in at the end of the day.

I also shouldn’t have to. That’s an annoying, unnecessary cognitive load.

If it dies in the middle of something important (and it does), stopping for some unknown number of minutes to let it charge is not a suitable option.

Currently, my fix is to have two magic mice; when the battery in one dies, I swap it out for the other one.

This is the only solution that doesn’t offload the cognitive burden of remembering to charge something at the end of the day onto me.

This is also a ridiculous solution to that problem.

> Only people who don't actually use an Apple Mouse think that this matters.

You got that backward. The people who are annoyed by these shortcomings don't use an Apple Mouse.

> Only people who don't actually use an Apple Mouse think that this matters.

I actually would use an Apple mouse and I think this matters. I don’t use one because of this issue. See my response above; tl;dr: I don’t ever want to leave the mouse unplugged.

> First, it ignores that it doesn't matter whether the charging port is on the bottom, because that mouse cannot operate when it's plugged in.

Yes, and this is a fundamental design flaw and it should be fixed.

> Second, it ignores that you can charge the thing in a few minutes, so, again, it doesn't matter that the port is on the bottom

Interrupting my flow for a few minutes is really unacceptable.

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