[garmaine]

My time has value. It has particularly high value when I'm in the middle of working on something. Interruptions in this state have especially high opportunity cost.

We could live in a universe where, when the "battery low" notification pops up I take a few seconds to plug in my mouse and go back to whatever I was working on. Instead, Apple purposefully chose to make me unable to use my mouse for a significant duration of time, at a moment that is NOT of my choosing.

On a laptop this is fine as I have the trackpad. On a desktop workstation (where my time is more valuable!) this means getting up and taking a walk, or getting a cup of coffee at the very least. Those are good activities to do, but only when they fit into my routine. As a sudden abrupt interruption, it is actually a cost. And at my hourly rates, a particularly high one greater than the amount I paid for the mouse in the first place.

So yeah, I do consider that "purposefully screwing over" the user. They could have made another perfectly reasonable design choice that would have had greater functionality, but opted not to for purely ephemeral reasons of branding and image.