[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.