Because it looks like you literally cannot charge this wireless mouse while you’re using it.
https://twitter.com/gregvaneekhout/status/841676949684535296
So what exactly is the victory condition, here? What is the problem with leaving the mouse plugged into the charger? – Or is it just that nobody at Apple remembers how to do this stuff, now that the Toymaker is gone?
Looks like “No visible charge port” ran up against “induction charging is to too bulky/expensive”
When aesthetes become more important than engineers…
I’m wondering if there’s a reason – battery life, maybe? – why they’d want people to not charge-while-using or use-while-charging …
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Is a mouse expected to outlast a laptop (3-5 year lifespan) or cell phone (2-3 year lifespan) ?
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Mew
Meh. Anything short of the Logitech Trackball is a failure to me. (looking at Moe while hinting a future birthday gift)
They’ll have to pry my Trackball out of my cold, dead hand.
I would have thought that even a minor view towards ergonomics would have picked this up as a problem, without the intervention of Steve Jobs.
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I think what this points toward is just a further cultural problem at Apple. It is not just Jobs- they do not have anyone who actually thinks at their company. This also points to a weird admin philosophy under Jobs. Usually managers surround themselves with people who share their vision for how the company and even the world works. If the manager has done his job properly, he can leave and not much will change unless they install a manager with a completely different vision who then surrounds himself with people who…
Oh.
Totally unrelated and possibly dumb question.
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Why hasn’t a “smart mouse *pad*” caught on?
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What I mean is .. the brains (and battery) go in the mouse *pad*, since it doesn’t move much, it gets a USB connection to the laptop so doesn’t need a battery, and it senses *literally anything* being used as “a mouse” ?
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Anyone who makes a buck off this idea should consider donating some to Moe.
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Mew
Variations of it have been tried. It doesn’t work very well, mainly due to a lack of reference points and lack of immediate feedback. Using a touchscreen and a stylus to provide your signature provides a good thumbnail sketch of the problem.
I regularly sign receipts on touchpad-equivalents, sometimes stock iPads in the “square” app .. lots of small coffee places seem to like “square”.
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It works fine. It didn’t “work fine” a decade ago, but it’s improved quite a bit…
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I’m wondering if this tech .. or the equivalent using a light-emitter/sensor .. think a Microsoft Kinetic gizmo on a *really* small scale .. would work today.
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Mew
I beg to differ that it works fine. You’ve seen what your signature looks like when you sign on those, and that’s a motion well engraved into your muscle memory.
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Processing power is great. It lets you do lots of interesting things.
But the precision of the input hasn’t increased since we (or a least I) were attempting to use light pens and digital pens for drafting over 20 years ago. Actually, they were significantly more precise than the touchpads and touchscreens I’ve seen recently.
And they sucked. They were seriously a nightmare to use. I’m not exaggerating when I say we smuggled mice into the computer lab and used our leg under the desk as a mousepad in preference.
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I paid extra to get a keyboard with mechanical switches. It’s old tech, but it’s also very clearly superior to mushy keyboards that don’t accept input consistently.
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If you’ve bought a laptop in the last decade, it most likely had a integral touchpad. Seriously, how long did it take you to disable the darned thing and hook up a peripheral mouse or trackball? That wasn’t because of the technical specs, it was because of the limitations in feedback and reference point. (And also the ability to accidentally bump the fricking thing and delete pages of work.)
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The Kinect is an interesting toy. It’s also extremely frustrating. There are lots of times it just doesn’t work well for all sorts of subtle reasons that are a pain in the tuchus to troubleshoot. (Backlighting in particular is something that it does not like. At all. Don’t have windows that face South. Or West. Or East.)
I kind of want a mechanical keyboard, but I can’t get past thinking that it’d be essentially a toy for me. Not that I object to toys, but I have a list.
I *still* haven’t gotten the touchpad fully disabled .. to do that, I’d apparently have to void the warranty.
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I do use a generic (Amazon .. Moe may have gotten a penny or two of the purchase, come to think of it) mouse. Thought about getting a trackball, but .. having used ’em back when such devices were *serial* (db9) .. and don’t really think the price of current ones are worth the money.
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Mew
Moe, let me shake you by your virtual lapels, and scream at you to get the keyboard!
(OK, I feel better now.)
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Seriously, it’s a tax deduction for you. And you can get a solid blue switch Geezer for $30 or less on Amazon. (Which will almost certainly blow away whatever you’re using now.)
It took me a long time to make the switch because I thought it would be a lot more expensive than it turned out to be. I use one of the Geezer keyboards I pointed you towards above, and I couldn’t be happier with it. (Sure, if I won the lottery, I’d get something with less garish lighting, but that’s just aesthetics. The thing is solid enough to use as a weapon in the event of a zombie apocalypse, and ridiculously crisp. It takes a day or so to get used to keys that actually pop back up, but after that? You’ll never look back.)
I’ll add it to the Cart: I have a birthday coming up in a couple of weeks, and my mom and my father-in-law know to get me gift certificates.
The reason they did that, which is not really a good reason, is that they really, really dislike wires. Plug it in for two minutes and it is supposed to run for nine hours.
It’s the same reason the Apple Pencil charges sticking out weirdly from an iPad when charging for one minute.
Also, if the wire was in the ‘correct’ placement, no-one would ever unplug it. For apple, it would be design ‘nails on a chalkboard’.
Heaven forfend I use my mouse the “wrong” way.
The most plausible reason, in addition to rigorously enforced design aesthetics, is that the way to solve the problem is for the user to buy two of these mice — one recharges while you’re using the other one.