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by e40 28 days ago
And a lot of people think he ruined at least some Apple products (too-thin laptops).
3 comments

> he ruined at least some Apple products

In my small circle of car friends, the new Ferrari is being called the "Magic mouse" of ferraris and posting memes of the car upside down with the cable plugged in at the bottom.

I was hoping for an SF90 meets Nevera when they were talking about it originally :(

But that is entirely unoriginal and derivative, compared to a designer wanting to make a mark.

Wow. The resemblance is uncanny.
> the "Magic mouse" of ferraris

Could be worse. Could be the 1998 iMac mouse of cars. (No way to tell which way it's going.)

I posit that a mouse that needs to be on its back to be charged, thus rendering it completely useless during that time, to be much much much worse than a round mouse with no immediate indication which way is forward...
I heard they didn't want it to be functional while charging because then people would use it plugged in all the time. They wanted it to be clear that it takes a little time to charge, then you use it unplugged. Might make more sense if there were battery level LEDs on the top or something. But it's just a couple reminders and then bang it's dead.
Can’t let people use it the way they want to now can we? They gotta use it the way I want them That’s the kind of attitude that gets you laptops with no ports and keyboards that don’t work.
Well, my Ive-cursed 2016 MacBook Pro had 4 (!) ThunderBolt/USB-C ports, which I kind of miss (though you had to use one of them for charging, you could also charge from either side). It was both thinner and lighter than recent 16" MacBook Pro models (but with ~5 hour battery life.)

It also had a semi-useful touchbar, no actual physical ESC key, a terrible "butterfly" keyboard that was replaced twice, and a large trackpad that had terrible palm rejection until they eventually fixed it.

So mostly not great, but I miss the form factor and those 4 TB/USB-C ports. I dream about having more of them.

The Magic Trackpad is fine and works fine both wired and wireless.
> because then people would use it plugged in all the time.

So people want to use the mouse while plugged in, and Apple designs a product that limits that...

Talk about hubris.

It takes a half hour to get months of charge back, so it’s not a functional problem. I think you wanted to have a wireless mouse with a port in the back so it feels like a wired mouse when you want it to. That would have been cool but I suspect a standard usb cable wouldn’t be rated for being continually contorted and wouldn’t be as pleasant as a wired mouse wire designed for that, so you’d need a special wire and it was just not going to work.
Even if it is half an hour, that's half an hour of /no functionality/ - whether that is acceptable to you is a personal decision, but to claim it's not a functional problem is a lie.

My Sony wireless headphones have a similar issue. They cannot be used (with Bluetooth / ANC) when charging. My ReDragon USB mouse does not have that issue - it has a standard USB-C port on the front edge and I only need to charge it every few weeks, which is far less often than I charge a phone, so insertion cycles is not a concern.

I had some Skullcandy bluetooth headphones I liked, and when the foam started to go, I bought the new model of the same product. The new ones instantly disconnect when charging, so you can't listen with them wired to a charger/power bank. Why???
> That would have been cool but I suspect a standard usb cable wouldn’t be rated for being continually contorted

I doubt that had anything to do with it. I've had multiple Magsafe cables that spend their entire existence in one spot on a desk (even using cable guides to keep them sitting within a few millimeters) do some bizarre "paper lanterning" of the rubber at the connector, and I'm far from the only one.

Let's be absolutely real. The port on the back would have ruined Ive's militance on sleekness and that was the reason it wasn't included. Form over function.

Jony Ive without a Steve Jobs to keep him grounded doesn't work.

From my work experience, you can't give a designer unlimited power because he/she will turn the product into an art project.

Not to mention iOS 7.

And the iPhone 5c which had toy-like colors and was reminiscent of Fisher-Price products. The 5c case with holes made it even worse.