[derefr]

The GP's same argument also applies to the Magic Mouse, as it happens:

> It's a way of signaling how the product should be used.

In the Magic Mouse's case, it came out just on the cusp of wireless mice becoming "a thing." Most people, if they were allowed, would have just left the mouse tethered to a computer by its charging cable at all times, since that's what they were used to. But Apple thought you'd be happier once you stopped doing that. So someone (Ive?) decided to make it so that you couldn't charge the Magic Mouse and use it at the same time. This did two things:

1. it forced people to try using the Magic Mouse without any cable connected, so that they would notice the added freedom a wireless mouse affords. It was a "push out of the nest."

2. it made charging annoying and flow-breaking enough that people would put it off as long as possible — which would make people realize that the Magic Mouse's battery lasted for weeks on a charge, and so you really never would need to interrupt your flow to charge; you'd just maybe leave it plugged in to charge when you leave work on a Friday night (and even then, only when it occurs to you), and that'd be it.

---

One could argue that the truly strange thing, is that Apple has never changed this design, 15 years and one revision later. That's an entire human generation! Presumably people these days know that peripherals can be wireless and have long battery life.

But consider: Apple's flagship mousing peripheral — the one shown next to the Magic Keyboard in all product marketing photos — is the Magic Trackpad, not the Magic Mouse. The Magic Trackpad is the first-class option for multitouch interaction with macOS; some more-recent multitouch gestures don't even work on the Magic Mouse. (The Magic Mouse never got "3D touch", for one thing.) In other words, the Magic Mouse is basically a forgotten also-ran at this point — something just there on the wall in the Apple Store for those few people who can't stand the idea of using a desktop computer through a giant trackpad.

Which leads to an interesting question: what is the user-profile for the person who buys (or is bought) a Magic Mouse in 2024?

Well, probably one major user-profile is "your grandpa, a retiree from a publishing company, who's been using the same computer he brought home from work 20 years ago, until it broke last week — that computer being a Power Mac G5 with a Mighty Mouse; and who has never had a laptop, and so never learned to use a trackpad."

And if the Magic Mouse user is your grandpa... then said user probably does still need the cord-cutting lesson that the Magic Mouse "teaches"!

[afavour]

> it made charging annoying and flow-breaking enough that people would put it off as long as possible — which would make people realize that the Magic Mouse's battery lasted for weeks on a charge

At a certain point this just reads like Apple apologia. They made a mouse you can’t use while it’s charging as a means to advertise how long the battery lasts? What?

[azinman2]

But it’s not an apology, it’s the right design decision. The battery charges to a usable amount extremely quickly, and if you could plug it in all the time most would, which defeats the point.

[afavour]

> if you could plug it in all the time most would, which defeats the point

The point of a mouse is to be a usable mouse. If folks care enough for it to be wireless then they can use it that way, but if they don't what's actually wrong with using it plugged in? Screams iPhone 4 era "holding it the wrong way". Baffles me why you'd want to provide fewer options for your customer to charge their wireless mouse in order to make them do it the "right way".

[derefr]

If you want to always drive a car with the parking brake on you can — it's your car — but if a driving instructor sees you doing it, they'll give you a demerit. Because you're massively hobbling the car vs. its design space.

> in order to make them do it the "right way".

To be clear, Apple likely didn't want to force people to always use the mouse that way; what they were likely aiming for was a "silent tutorial" — like the Super Mario Bros 1-1 "goombas hurt you, while mushrooms are something you want" thing.

It's just that, in a hardware product, there's no good way to force someone to do something a certain way the first time (in order to teach them), without forcing them to always do it that way.

[afavour]

I’m sorry but this is an absurd comparison. Driving a car with the handbrake on has an adverse effect on the primary purpose of the car. Using a wireless mouse with the wire attached still leaves you with an entirely functional mouse. Using it wirelessly is a preference. It is absurd to defend Apple forcing people to use it without a wire because it will “enforce design purpose”. If they need to do so then it’s the wrong purpose.

[ryandrake]

Why should Apple care if I want to leave the device plugged in all the time? How does this choice remotely affect them?

Same with this power button: why should Apple care whether or not I power off the device when I’m done using it and turn it back on in the morning? This all just seems like pointless behavior control.

[derefr]

> Why should Apple care if I want to leave the device plugged in all the time? How does this choice remotely affect them?

Because the wireless-ness of the mouse (while also being a macOS-compatible multi-touch surface) was the selling point / feature / Unique Selling Proposition of this mouse vs. other mice (and vs. the previous Apple Mighty Mouse.)

I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to see many "normal" people's home-office desks, but I have — I worked as a call-out computer repair tech as a teen. And it taught me something: a lot of people have a really small or cluttered "mousing area" — often arranged in such a way that, for a wired mouse, the mouse's wire gets in the way of the mousing surface.

Picture, for example, an old 18"-deep sewing desk up against a wall, on which the user has placed their laptop [effectively permanently, as its battery is long dry]; with a bunch of other things like tiny little speakers and an inkjet printer competing for space on that tiny desk, such that there is only a 8"x8" square of free space to the right of a laptop. The user's mouse is then plugged into a USB-A port of the laptop that's also on the right [mouse cable is too short to plug it in on the left!], with the port being at about the center of the laptop's side. This mouse cable now "wants" to lay directly into the center of that clear 8"x8" square of space; and even if you bend it harshly, there's at least two inches of USB-A plug + cable strain-relief that will still be poking you in the hand.

(Why do they use a mouse at all, if they have a laptop, which presumably has a trackpad? Because trackpads on laptops — especially smaller/older/cheaper ones — can be ridiculously awful [tiny, laggy, insensitive, jumpy, etc], such that this cramped mousing experience is still better than the alternative.)

In such setups, "erasing" the mouse's tether to the computer is not just for aesthetics; it's a genuine ergonomic improvement that makes it "feel" better to use the computer.

And that means that any average cramped-desk person who buys one of these new-fangled wireless mice (or a computer that comes with one) — and actually does use it un-tethered — is going to become not only an advocate for wireless mice, but also likely an advocate of whatever brand of the mouse/computer was, due to the novelty-capture halo effect. (I.e. the "if you only date awful people, you'll become obsessive about the first romantic partner to be decent to you" effect. Decency [or wirelessness] isn't unique; but if you only know it from one place...)

That viral halo-effect-induced word-of-mouth brand-advocacy created by being at the vanguard of the Bluetooth wireless peripheral transition, is the potential upside that Apple saw when creating the Magic Mouse.

And it wouldn't be one they could capture, if they allowed sheer incuriosity to lead that average cramped-desk user to never even try the mouse without the charging cable attached (or, worse yet, if the Macs that shipped with Magic Mice were set up by people who didn't even know the mouse was supposed to be wireless — thinking instead that the mouse was just a wired mouse with a "modular" cable!)

---

Now, admittedly, Apple had many other ways they could have achieved the same goals.

For example, they could have just detected that you're using a Magic Mouse with one of their computers for the first time, and forced you through a little software tutorial that gets you to unplug it — and use it unplugged — for a bit.

I'm guessing they didn't go with that solution for several reasons:

• it goes against the marketing of Macs as being "ready to use for productivity out-of-the-box". Forcing you through a hand-holding tutorial isn't very "ready." (And mark my word, if there was a skip button, even the people most in need of that tutorial — especially those people — would skip it. People don't read manuals on frickin' home CPAP machines, and then die; you think they're reading that?)

• Apple loves thinking of themselves as a design company first and foremost. (Apple products are all stamped "designed in California" — that's what Apple does there, they design things.) And if you know anything about "design" as an academic discipline, you know it's all about figuring out how to shape products or information in ways that cause people to subconsciously/intuitively make certain choices. The core of Information Design is visual hierarchy — "organizing and formatting text to ensure someone glancing at a poster gets the most critical information before glancing away." The core of Industrial Design is the concept of affordances — "putting push-plates on the push side of a door and pull-bars on the pull side." Apple doesn't want to stop you and tell you how to use their stuff; Apple thinks they are clever enough to design their products such that they afford being used in exactly the intended way. And when the product's design "fights back" from having a positive affordance to idiomatic usage... they just design more forcibly, actively de-affordancing non-idiomatic usage.

• A tutorial that pops up on Macs doesn't help someone who wandered into an Apple Store; bought a Magic Mouse (a perfect "this store is too expensive for me, but I want to buy something" purchase in an Apple Store ca. 2009); went home, and promptly plugged it into... their Windows PC. Yes, people really do sometimes buy Mac peripherals and expect them to upgrade their Windows-using experience, not realizing that Windows doesn't have the particular set of multitouch gestures mentioned on the back of the box (especially not back in 2009.) The "hardware tutorial", meanwhile, is platform-neutral.

[ryandrake]

Thanks for the really really long reply... You've exhaustively gone over the selling points for a wireless mouse and why people would want and buy one. I don't think any of it is in question. It's great to have a mouse that can work without a cord connected. I bought a wireless mouse (not Apple's) because I agree with you about the selling points. What I don't get is why not also allow it to be used plugged in, if the user wants to, assuming it costs about the same to put the charging port on the front, and can be done without compromising the industrial design? Why deliberately make it useless while plugged in?

[lelaurent]

If you’re using it for gaming, it would be preferable to leave it plugged in to avoid the danger of the battery running empty.

Why not let the users use it as they see fit?

[wink]

Please explain how it's in my best interest that I must use my peripherals wirelessly. The only wireless mouse I have ever owned is in my work bag, so I have one wherever I go, it's not for regular use and I have zero problems with mouse cables, for the actual 30th year this December.

[azinman2]

Because it’s the design of the product? Every product is designed with a specific usage in mind. This is designed to be wireless, hence all of the ways in which it enforces and enables that. The battery lasts a very long time, so even in your work bag it should be fine (although are you then plugging into many different computers to associate it?)

If you want a corded mouse (and it sounds like that’s a better fit), there are plenty of options on the market.

[initplus]

The port on the bottom is really the least offensive element of the design. I know people find it fun to clown on, but if any of them had ever used one for 5 minutes they would realize it's a terrible mouse for a bunch of other more important reasons (weight, feet quality, tracking accuracy, polling rate etc.).

[Sammi]

The worse part about the Magic Mouse is just how small it is. It's uncomfortably small. The Magic Trackpad however is a great.

[Wojtkie]

I use it at work exclusively. I love it due to the gesture controls and build quality.

[dagmx]

Yeah I hate that people go for the easy fodder, which barely effects real world use, and ignore the multiple actual issues with it that would make it quite poor even if the charging port was fixed.

[seec]

There is one thing where you are right: Apple doesn't care much about mouses and is all in with trackpads. But this also completely disproves your theory about why the charging port is on the bottom of the Magic Mouse. Indeed, both the Magic Trackpad and the Magic Keyboard have charging ports on their back, making it very easy to use them wired, which many people do. If Apple was so set on forcing people to use their wireless peripherals without the wire, you would find the port on the bottom too. Yes, it would be very dumb and this is exactly what it is with the Magic Mouse.

The only difference is that the Magic Mouse was first designed with a door for swappable batteries and when they did the refresh and just put a port in its place with no further amelioration. Both the keyboard and trackpad shape changed (became thinner because there was no need for round batteries storage anymore) but they didn't change the mouse.

We can make all kinds of theories about why but the simple answer is that they don't care and they feel like their mouse looks nice and don't want to invest in changing the design. This is pretty much all there is to it, lots of apathy towards customers and a general lack of care, otherwise they could have made some other upgrades (like the sensor) a long time ago, without having to touch this stupid charging port.

And this is why they get a lot of shit for it and it's well deserved, if Apple is too lazy to make a mouse, then they shouldn't make one, especially not one that cost a 100.

All the apologetic theories about teaching people to use wireless stuff are so nonsense its really crazy that people can believe that.

[derefr]

You might be right, but I'm not sure the timeline lines up.

The Magic Trackpad didn't exist when the Magic Mouse 1 (the one with AA batteries) was designed. So they definitely cared about the design of the Magic Mouse at that time.

The Magic Mouse 2 (the one with that added the bottom charging port) was released on the same day as the Magic Trackpad 2, and the Magic Keyboard 1. The three devices were almost certainly designed together, likely by the same industrial designer. And, because the Magic Keyboard was a ground-up design at the time, this would have been one of the more-senior designers doing a complete design cycle, aiming to create a coherent "peripheral brand image" to suit the marketing of a new generation of Macs.

If that designer chose to do very little to the (external) design of the Magic Mouse 1 to update it to the Magic Mouse 2, that might be because they were taking operational-logistics concerns into account, e.g. a stock of existing aluminum housings + multitouch-digitizer-laminated plastic covers. But, more likely in my opinion, they just thought that the IXD of the Magic Mouse 1 already achieved its goals (in Apple's conception, not necessarily the consumer's!), and already aligned with the brand image they wanted for the Magic Trackpad 2 and Magic Keyboard 1.

Remember that the Magic Mouse is a mouse. You need to grip it and move it, and it needs to have a certain amount of inertia so that bumping it doesn't shoot it off your table. So it needs to have a certain weight and a certain height.

I have a strong suspicion that, back when developing the MM1, Apple's design team invested into a design-prototyping human-factors-analysis phase, to find an optimal height and weight (and center of gravity!) for the Magic Mouse, so that it would "feel good in the hand" and hit some optimum between "gliding and clicking well as a mouse" and "resisting running away from you when used as a multitouch surface."

If I recall consumer reviews at the time, the MM1 was taken as a step-change in the "prioritization of function over form" of Apple's mice. Before the MM1, Apple's last ergonomically-satisfying mouse had been the Apple Desktop Mouse II back in 1992! In the late 90s/early 2000s — that's the iMac "puck mouse" and Apple Pro Mouse era — many people had been just tossing out the mouse their Macs came with, and buying PC mice instead!

Since the MM1's (very likely) evidence-based design had been so successful, the designer of the MM2 probably wanted to reuse the "backed by the research" numbers the MM1 had arrived at. As long as human hands are human hands, those will still be the right numbers (at least when viewed through the lens of Apple's internal IXD-culture biases.)

There are several ways the MM2's designer could have aimed to hit these same numbers — but the simplest way to do it (provided the old design still "fit" in the new line-up) would be to keep the external form-factor the same (thus keeping the height and grip the same), and add just enough lithium-ion capacity inside the device, in just the right place, to hit the same weight and center of gravity that the MM1 had.

---

> both the Magic Trackpad and the Magic Keyboard have charging ports on their back, making it very easy to use them wired, which many people do

The Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad don't need to move. They're supposed to stay where they are, unless you pick them up. So they can maximize thinness and lightness (which looks "sexy", and is better for supply-side materials and shipping costs), while staying in place by just having really grippy feet (made of the most dust-collecting silicone I've ever seen on a device.)

Apple doesn't care if you leave the Magic Trackpad or Magic Keyboard plugged in all the time, because they're stationary. There's no User Experience "magic" you get by unplugging them. Unplugging them is convenient in certain limited-space environments, and de-clutters your desk, and looks good in product photos — but it doesn't make using them better.

---

ETA: I looked into what actually changed between the MM1 and MM2. You might be surprised!

Keeping the same external form-factor, doesn't mean that the MM2 was just "the MM1 with a lithium cell where the batteries had been."

Here are fully-disassembled images of the MM1 and MM2, c/o iFixit:

• MM1: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/TcIwDRPZ4WfdvjJF.hug...

• MM2: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/ovXNR4Y3aAUYXGNj.hug...

So, for starters, there was clearly a complete internal redesign and rework of the board. Different ICs, different layout — even a different sensor, in a different package, from a different vendor, with different optics.

Also take notice of how the charge controller is integrated onto the MM2's mainboard. There are companies that have transitioned pre-manufactured devices to a rechargeable rev, by "just slapping a charging port in where the battery door had been" — and those companies tend to stick the charge controller and charge connector together to form a little floating board, and run flying leads from that floating board to the mainboard in one direction, and to the battery cells in another, so that the whole charging assembly together "presents as batteries" to the mainboard, whether it's being charged or not. This was not that kind of hackjob.

And actually, the external design changed in several subtle ways, too. Note the differently-designed runners that interface into the housing in a different way, for example. Note that even the digitizer connection to the underside of the touch surface is different — which probably implies a different digitizer, and means that they couldn't reuse the existing acrylic top housings (that they almost certainly get shipped to them with digitizers already laminated in.)

In other words: the MM2 didn't reuse anything! These are entirely different parts, that just happen to look the same on the outside.

There would have thus been no parts-reuse advantage in putting the charging port where they did. It was a "free choice" — they could have put it anywhere. They were milling out new, different aluminum bottom housings (that have more material than before, so they can't just be reworks of the previous rev's bottom housing) — there was nothing stopping the designer from putting a little hole in that bottom housing on the front side!

(Nothing, that is, other than the designer's likely belief that the MM1 form factor — where the bottom housing of the mouse tapers thinner at the front and back so that the top housing basically meets the mousing surface — was some kind of Good, Evidence-Backed Ergonomics, that they would be sacrificing if they made the whole mouse body a few mm taller to give a front-side port somewhere to extrude from. I repeat what I said before: this was an ideals-driven choice, not laziness.)

[Panzer04]

This is a really interesting view, and I have to admit this actually makes sense. Wireless mice definitely are nicer to use, and you can usually make them charge fast enough that a five minute charge while you take a short break is enough to get you through the day to a proper charge.

I must admit, in light of that logic I can totally buy placing the charge port like that solely to force users to use the mouse correctly.