Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tzs 890 days ago
It's not that baffling. It let them keep the exact same form factor as the previous non-rechargeable Magic Mouse, and the mouse can go long enough between charges and charges so fast that they knew in practice 99.99% of Mac users would not have a problem with it.

It charges to full in a couple hours and lasts at least a month on a full charge so almost everyone has plenty of opportunities to charge it at times when they aren't using the computer.

If you do let it get low enough that it might die it only takes a couple minutes of charging to get enough charge to last 8 hours. Start charging and go get a drink of water or visit the bathroom and when you get back it is ready for the rest of the work day.

That said, from what I've read there either is no warning when power gets low or it doesn't always work. With it only needing charging every month or so I can someone forgetting. It is possible to make a script to check it and give an alert if it is low, and make a cron job run that script [1]. That really should be built in.

[1] https://dev.to/samselfridge/magic-mouse-low-battery-alert-4m...

2 comments

> and lasts at least a month on a full charge

Which is very short compared to other mice: Logitech's (and mostly everybody else's, I assume) Bluetooth mice last for several months, some last for years on a single charge. I suppose it's not a fair comparison in that the Apple mouse does more? But they still suck in terms of runtime.

lol, this is such a victim-blaming answer, the design is bananas there's no excuse for it. Changing the form-factor slightly is worth it so you can plug the damn thing in while charging.
It can't be victim-blaming because there are no victims. 99.99% of people who have those mice will never find themselves in a situation where not being able to charge while using affects them.

The 0.01% who manage to find themselves with an empty battery will be slightly inconvenienced for two minutes while they charge it up enough to get to the end of their day.