Hacker News Reader

Comment by ambrose2 | Hacker News Reader

This topic comes up again and again, and what I’ve noticed is that folks who use the mouse often find that it lasts for months and months without recharging. Folks that like the mouse (myself included) agree that the frequency of charging is very low, while folks that don’t like the mouse will say that it’s unacceptable.

View on HN

I use the wireless Apple keyboard and trackpad, which both have similar battery lives, but when the battery runs out it always somehow happens to be right before a meeting where I really need to plug it in and use it right now

(and these days when everything else is USB-C, instead I'm scrambling to find where my damn lightning cable has gone)

Although I get why they would not put the port on the back - their Lightning cables are not built for the repeated motion/strain of a plugged-in mouse. Anything more strain than plugging your phone in and setting it down causes the cables to break down in months.

The cables don’t last because of pretty but ineffective strain relief. Another failure squarely imputable to Jony Ive.

I can only recommend using BetterTouchTool for adding more guestures to the mouse - and it comes with a nice feature, it reminds me when the charge of the mouse goes below 25%. This gives me several days to recharge it before it actually gets low.

> I use the wireless Apple keyboard and trackpad, which both have similar battery lives,

The keyboard has 3-5x the battery life of the trackpad. Not sure how they can be similar to the mouse if they’re not even similar to each other.

Similar as in you're not recharging it on a daily or weekly basis, but only very rarely. A 3 or 6 month battery life doesn't make a big difference on that scale.

Some of us who use the mouse always want to keep it plugged in all the time because the extra cable on the desk is less important to us than (a) having it not occasionally glitch due to Bluetooth and/or (b) not wanting the extra burden of having to charge it. I guess scheduling the charging is minor if you don’t have ADHD, but it’s still one more stupid thing to take care of that really isn’t necessary.

I have ADHD, but it presents itself differently. For me, a more minimal desk free of the sight of cables (all the time) and free of annoyance of the tension of a cable or sound of a cable grazing against the desk (all the time) trumps plugging in a mouse twice a year when I stop working for the day. But I’m the type that can’t focus when I see a battery icon is low, and so I’ll just take care of it when I notice.

I, too, think that an extra battery isn’t worth it, but that there are people who want a mouse that is always plugged in doesn’t mean a wireless mice that can’t always be plugged in is badly designed.

It almost feels like the silly charging port was placed there on purpose. It tells users that you're not meant to use it plugged in, stop worrying about the battery, it'll be fine. And conversely it forces the engineers to build something that doesn't need to be charged constantly.

...I still prefer my Logitech mouse that works plugged in though.

In my experience it needed charging much more frequently than that, and often at completely unpredictable and inconvenient times. I resorted to keeping a spare plugged in at all times when I worked in an office.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com