In Defense, I Swear, of the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port Placement

Monday, 28 October 2024

Jay Peters, The Verge, “Apple Put the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port on the Bottom Again”:

Apple’s new USB-C-equipped Magic Mouse somehow still has the charging port on the bottom. While Apple could have used the launch as an opportunity to move the charging port from the underside of the device — where the port has remained for nearly a decade, despite other updates to the mouse and being mocked for the decision — the port is still there.

This new $99 Magic Mouse means that, for the foreseeable future, Apple still thinks that the best way to charge your Magic Mouse is by flipping it over to plug it in, making it so you can’t use it. Why?

We’ve all been waiting for Apple to update the “Magic” input peripherals — keyboards, trackpads, and mice — to USB-C, and they’re finally here. None of them seem significantly changed aside from the port, including, as Peters notes, that the refreshed Magic Mouse doesn’t move the charging port from the bottom. It’s just USB-C instead of Lightning now. This will antagonize the vocal contingent of people who think the port placement is not merely ill-considered, but downright absurd. But I’m not surprised in the least that Apple didn’t change it. The contingent of Magic Mouse port-on-the-belly haters is, as I said, vocal, but I also think it’s small.

Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.

My other hunch is that the Magic Mouse’s designers actually see the inability to use it while plugged in as a feature, not a bug. They want you to use it wirelessly, so you have to use it wirelessly. A wired mouse feels different because the cable adds a bit of tension. Sometimes with a tethered mouse, especially if the mouse is lightweight, it’ll move a little from cable tension when you let go of it. If you could use it wired, some users would use it wired. That can’t happen with a mouse whose port is on the bottom.

I know for a fact that Apple designers have considered designs for a mouse with the port exposed at the front, and everything they came up with looked worse. Putting the port on the belly is putting form over function, but in this case Apple’s designers think the better form is worth the trade-off. With this design, the mouse looks better 100 percent of the time it’s in use, and it looks a bit silly every few months when you need to charge it.¹

“We’re willing to accept the annoyance of forcing a few-minute break in your work if you run it down to 0%, in exchange for a more elegant appearance and preventing you from using it with a feel we don’t intend for it to have” is their choice. I for one salute that commitment. I also suspect the overwhelming majority of Magic Mouse users have no complaints about the charging port. In Tim Cook’s parlance, I suspect it has high “customer sat”. Apple does make design mistakes, but when they do, they fix them. Those flaky, undependable butterfly MacBook keyboards lasted five years, but during that stretch, Apple shipped several “OK, we think we fixed it this time” tweaks, like adding a “silicone membrane” in 2018, before finally throwing in the towel and abandoning the butterfly switch design entirely. That 5-year stretch shows that while Apple doesn’t necessarily fix design mistakes quickly, they attempt to fix them quickly.

But the Magic Mouse has charged like this since 2015, with no tweaks. That’s 9 years. It sucks when it runs out of juice right in the middle of working, but that happens only every few months, and you get warnings before it’s entirely drained. All told, it’s fine. Apple sticking with this design in the face of vociferous peanut gallery mockery reminds me of the company’s noble commitment to a single-button mouse, in the name of simplicity, after Windows popularized two-button mice in the 1990s. If you don’t like the Magic Mouse, MacOS has built-in support for third-party mice (as did classic Mac OS have support for multi-button third-party mice). The Magic Mouse charging port placement is an opinionated design, not an absurd design.

That said, I will profess that I haven’t personally used any Apple mouse since the ADB era (in the aforementioned 1990s).² Modern Apple mice just aren’t physically comfortable for my mouse grip, don’t support third-party mouse drivers like SteerMouse (which lets me set the mouse speed way faster than Apple’s system mouse driver), and I prefer a physical scroll wheel (with reversed, a.k.a. unnatural, direction). I charged up and used a Magic Mouse while writing this article, and within one hour my wrist started to ache. I also think the Magic Mouse clicks too loudly. No joke, my daily driver for the last 4 years has been this simple Lenovo mouse I bought on a lark back in December 2020. So take my mouse opinions with that ThinkPad-branded grain of salt.