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John Gruber: "In Defense, I Swear, of the Magic Mouse’s Charging Port Placement"

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.

The Magic Mouse is not inherently a pants-on-head stupid idea, or a pants-on-head stupid implementation of that idea. The problem is just that the Magic Mouse wants to be a mouse with a touch surface, touch surfaces want to be planar, ie basically flat, and good mouse ergonomics entail shapes that are not basically flat.

For most people, comfort means fitting effortlessly in your grip. A flat mouse means that your palm is splayed, and if you palm is splayed, your fingers have to grip it by the side. (Or you have to sort of push it against the desk with your hand, which is perilous with any mouse and doubly so with a touch surface one.) This is not usually terribly comfortable, compared to a mouse shape that more readily adheres to the natural way your hand cups and grips, which most mice adopt to some extent, and some do to a quite large extent.

So, is it worth it? It's obviously a trade-off. If what you want to do all day every day is make touch gestures, and they speed up your work, then yes. I love making touch gestures, and have enjoyed touch scrolling on a Magic Mouse when using it on occasion (I don't own one), but I have also had significant trouble performing those touch gestures compared to on a MacBook trackpad, since you often need to exert force not just by performing the gesture, but by steadying the mouse simultaneously.

These properties of the Magic Mouse are reasonably understood within minutes, if not intellectually then at least vividly. It's possible I'm underestimating the proportion of people whose anatomy allow them complete comfort with a Magic Mouse — that proportion, even if small, is likely at least hundreds of thousands of people at Apple's scale — or the probably decidely bigger proportion who just don't care and consider it a worthwhile trade-off.

The Magic Mouse as a first attempt of a mouse that is usably a touch surface for gestures is not bad. The Magic Mouse as the current attempt of such a mouse, nine years in, is rather dreadful. The solution space may have been exhaustively explored behind the scenes, but it doesn't look like it.

Touch surfaces don't just want to be planar, but they want to be horizontal, lest your hand wants to fall off. But there are designs like the Logitech MX Vertical that lean into a certain grip where your fingers rest, unstrained, in a vertical-ish position. How would touch gestures work on such a mouse?

Even if they did, could Apple ship one by default, considering that it would inherently not be ambidextrous? Probably not. (But Apple have shipped multiple mice before.)

So what about the cable then? A mouse is a tool for creative use. A mouse that is well designed for purpose allows that creativity to continue with as few interruptions and restraints as possible. Plugging in a cable is a small interruption. (And feeling the tug of the cable as you move around is a small-to-medium restraint, depending on the cable; compare to an Apple Pencil theoretically being plugged in at the cap to charge, where it would impede mobility and shift the weight quite drastically.) Forcing a minutes-long break is a larger interruption — an interruption that's not hard to anticipate or plan around or assimilate into regular needs to take a break, to be sure, but an interruption nonetheless.

The Magic Mouse is consistent in its vision of putting its projected image of an outwardly considered object first. It chose a hard set of problems to solve. It is an attempt to solve them, coronated by its maker as a flawless solution. What it isn't is a spectacularly good computer mouse. There are plenty of spectacularly good computer mice out there, and there are even more that have leaps-and-bounds better ergonomics than the Magic Mouse.

New needs friends, and progress is often downstream of a few blind alleys. But at this point I'm more than interested what a Magic Mouse 2, that tries to take the learnings of how Magic Mouse has played out in real life and how people's bodies actually work and do something different, would look like.

To just ship the same thing after nine years, with all the flaws that its trade-offs have lead to would be... well, pants-on-head stupid.