> release something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid that it should be embarrassing

I’m still trying to understand who came with the idea of charging the mouse from under, instead of from a position that would allow to use the mouse while charging…

I believe that was intentional, to prevent people using it plugged in, which would mean most people would keep it plugged in all the time, so it wouldn't be a wireless mouse anymore, but also degrade the battery lifespan.

I also believe that was intentional. But the reason was the typical Apple / Jobs hubris of knowing better than the users. The desktop looks cleaner with fewer cables, so they wanted to enforce use without the cable plugged in.

I don't have a source for this, but I'm pretty sure I've read something like that a long time ago.

As someone who doesn't give a flying fuck about design this is exactly what bothers me with Apple.

Computers are not fashion or status symbol they are a tool. Although I do have a "ice" motherboard..

It was intentional to recycle the design of the Magic Mouse 1 which used AA batteries. The Magic Touchpad and Keyboard came out the exact same day as the Magic Mouse 2 and they don't share the Magic Mouse 2's stupid design. They both have perfectly usable ports on the front and even work when wired without pairing.

Right.... So.... Add some charging circuitry. Is it a problem if people don't use it as a wireless mouse anyway.

Yes it's very apple to force users to use devices how Apple wants, but that isn't a particularly good reason.

Maybe they should have made the batteries replaceable and make it operable without batteries installed.

Or just ship a wired version for the people who want that.

That wired hockey puck mouse was an abomination

Cycling the battery continuously is worse for lifespan.

Textbook case of form over function. Either an engineering constraint forced by the design and deemed an acceptable trade-off by higher-ups, or maybe more likely, the designer just thought a visible charging port would’ve ruined their design.

While the exact reason has never been documented, if you look at that mouse's design, you'll see that its first generation had a regular battery compartment on the bottom. When gen 2 arrived, they fully reused the same shell and only replaced that bottom part to now be an integrated battery with a charging port instead of a compartment for AAs. Moving the charging port would've required a brand new design, since every edge of the mouse tapers way too much for a port to be placed anywhere else. They would also probably need to change more of the internal structure, as opposed to just swapping a battery module and changing the bottom lid. In this case the constraint seems to just be about functionality and manufacturing. Apple has made many controversial design decisions that have no functional justifications in the past, yet people keep bringing up the mouse.

The reason people talk about the mouse is that it's one of the worst ideas they ever had.

At the time, I remember someone claimed that the reason was that they were afraid people could leave it plugged in for convenience. Apple thought that would lead to a worse experience because their mouse was designed to be used wirelessly. I think it was actually more related to aesthetic "icks" by the designers, because people would have disconnected the cable if it was in the way.

This is not even close to the worst ideas Apple ever had, even if you're only talking about mice.

The original USB mouse (for the first iMac) was round, so you couldn't orient it in your hand without looking at it constantly.

And it came with a very short cord (because there was a port on the right side of the keyboard to plug it into). But then the laptops got updated with USB ports and they were only on the LEFT side of the case.

For at least a year or two you could not buy an Apple mouse for your Apple PowerBook and use it in your right hand, because the cord was too short to go around the case.

Eventually they shipped a "Pro" mouse with revolutionary elongated shape and longer cord. (...and optical tracking, and what looked like zero buttons, which were pretty neat)

Uhg i totally forgot about their round mouse. Bright colored iMac days!

Yet it is one thing I love very much about my MX anywhere 3. The wire connection is simply more performance and I get to use it when I did not charge. It is also compatible with any non-Bluetooth device.

> I think it was actually more related to aesthetic "icks" by the designers, because people would have disconnected the cable if it was in the way.

A lot of people really will just anxiously leave the cable in the whole time if given the opportunity. I have a wired/wireless Logitech mouse and I confess that I hardly ever remove the cable. Between this, and the space and connector issues of adding a "normal" cable connection as referred to in the grandparent, we have two reasons to think that Apple's decision wasn't all that clearly bad, let alone one of their worst.

Nobody leaves the cables attached. Except wanna be pro gamers who think a couple milliseconds will help them more than practice to "git gud". Every mouse I have is wireless, and I almost never use them plugged in, except for the one on the server that get used so rarely it's self-discharged should probably be wired but I simply don't have any wired ones left. Just plug them in overnight every once in a while, golden.

But what's your basis for assuming that everyone has your habits in this respect?

> it's one of the worst ideas

It's still one of the worst ideas. Insult to injury.

"If you see a stylus, they blew it"

That's a quote from Steve Jobs about how basically all of their competition (except Google) had made the mistake of trying to ship desktop software on phones. The problem with the stylus is that it's a hardware workaround for a software problem: the sort of cost-reduced engineering you get when a company wants to "have a mobile strategy" without actually putting in the time and effort to make something good.

The Magic Mouse is the exact same kind of "we couldn't care less" cost-reduction. The charging port is on the bottom because that's the only place you can put a charging port with the existing all-glass design. Because they re-used an existing design intended for removable batteries. This is such an uncharacteristically un-Apple move, and one so obviously detrimental to the design of the device, that people (including myself) actually psyopped themselves into thinking Apple had deliberately designed the mouse to enforce wireless usage.

And, to be clear, Apple has never done that.

All their other peripherals with rechargeable batteries in them will let you use them fully wired if you plug them in. In fact, if you somehow engineered a way to move the charging port somewhere less stupid, the Magic Mouse probably would work plugged-in, too.

If you see a charging port on the bottom, they blew it.

I agree, I always found the charging port location to be a total non-issue. The battery life is long, charging is fast, and you get warned that the battery level is low long before the mouse dies.

In fact, the real crime of the Magic Mouse is how awkward it is to switch it between machines.

While I get the feeling you appreciate the, erhm, efficiency with which Apple modified this product, the problem is that Apple is not supposed to be efficient. They don't need to save money on the engineering process because they are not hurting for money. They sell themselves as being a design-forward company that prides itself on making bold, not expedient, choices. To take a shortcut like that shows a lack of respect for the customer to whom they are charging premium prices for these items.

So if they're reusing the shell, they passed the savings on to customers right?

If this were a £10 mouse then this excuse might be valid, but it isn't.

Where should a cord on a mouse be when it's charging? The same place as any cord on a mouse should be, i.e. the tail, would be the commonsense answer. Indeed this is how all other dual-mode mouses do it.

How many generations of that mouse design have there been now? Any changes to it? Wireless charging support could be a nice bandaid on that terrible design.

Modern wireless mice from logitech and microsoft last for a year or two on a pair of aa batteries. There is no point making them rechargeable any more. You can always use rechargeable aa nihms if you really want to, but personally I just have 50p of alkaline aa's and in two years I will have to change them again. Some things do get better :)

The only point IMHO to built in battery, is if it very convenient to recharge, which is not the case. I have an HHKB which uses 2 AAA, with rechargeable Li batteries which I can reload with usb, while still using the keyboard with cable (once every 6 months or so)

AA batteries have also immensely gone down in cost compared to the 1990s.

Their laptop touchpads are the only Apple "pointer" input device I've ever liked. (And by extension, the iPhone and iPad.)

I hate myself every time I settle for yet another disposable Microsoft mouse.

Though, I would have killed for an Apple Pencil, back when I was a CAD jockey.

For me, the butterfly keyboard was Apple's mostest worstest user interface design decision.

(Doubly so because it persisted for so long. I love that Apple (and others) try new things. But I don't understand commitment to design failures.)

Source: I've been an Apple partisan since the Apple ][. Even stubbornly resisting Amiga's siren call.

> For me, the butterfly keyboard was Apple's mostest worstest user interface design decision.

I really liked the butterfly kb. It was responsive, and you could hit the key cap anywhere and it would register.*

Subsequent mac book keyboards imo are all terrible and suffer from the terrible issue of sponge-ness that means i can literally press a key cap in a slightly off centre location and it Does Not Register. Its like the key movement is separate from the actuation. I have way more mis key and missing letter using later post butterfly kbs than i ever did. The worst part is this is ‘normal’ and not a fault. You just have to press harder and in the centre.

* except when it was in for work i had 3x top case replaced on my old mbp

Ya, you're right. When it worked, it worked well. A point worth remembering, thanks. Alas, they just weren't robust enough, interferring with my work.

"when it worked, it worked" is one of the weakest excuses possible, and one Apple themselves railed against many times. Not working at all (ie: broken) is quite worse than not working beyond perfectly.

Who cares if you can't press a key on the very edge, as long as pressing in the proper spot _always_ works? The one that did accept blatant mis-presses was broken often enough to completely overwhelm any benefits, because it can't accept _any_ presses when it's in for repairs!

"I like the keyboard that let me be a bad typist, even though I had to get it replaced 3 times, and that lack of robustness actually interfered with my work." Are you listening to yourselves?

Let me introduce you to the world of _devices for keeping small kids asleep_.

For whatever reason they won’t work when hooked up to a charger and of course the moment you need them most the batteries have gone dead so you must charge…

At this point I can’t help but think that the people who design these things really hate parents

Red and green, if the color has some meaning, should be avoided. 10% of males have problems with that colors (dyschromatopsia) specially with led colors. For indicators blue and white are very easy to see, even in not optimal lightning. The option to disable them is nice.

> unless you have already used the other colours and now you need more colours

In that case you will end up with Christmas decorations. Better solution is usually placement and form.

Mixing red and green should be avoided. There’s no problem using either alone. Human color vision is the least sensitive to blue light, so a blue indicator led has to be made brighter than an equivalent red or green led to be as visible in bright ambient lighting. But that makes blue leds disastrous in low light, where the opposite is the case (vision is the most sensitive to blue). Of course there never was any reason for blue standby lights except the fact that blue leds had novelty value and looked futuristic compared to boring old red and green leds.

Phrasal verbs are listed under the main verb. I never ever had a problem with that. As a native speaker sometimes I still have to search for some in some strange context.

You better believe is not just one user. Read the comments. We are thousands or millions. I‘m really tired of the shitty Keyboard. For a long time I thought it was my fault, now I know is not.

Seems you don’t remember much of that time. Let me refresh: “we are the dot in dot com”

They did bot compile the whole linux, mind you, just an absolute minimal kernel.

Doing a real compiler to be used by humans is difficult. Doing a compiler that “gets the thing done” is a different thing.

Nowhere did I imply it is production-ready. I said "working compiler" and by definition Claude built one since they booted up the kernel.

Have you ever seen Tsoding youtube channel? I’m sure Mr Zosin can very much do it in one week. And considering russian salaries, it will be like an order of magnitude cheaper.

Making a basic C compiler, without much error/warn detection and/or optimizations, is as a matter if fact no so difficult. In many Universities is a semester project for 2 to 3 students.

Everybody talks as Linux is the most difficult thing to compile in the world. The reality is that linux is well written and designed with portability with crappy compilers in mind from the beginning.

Also, the booting part, as stated some times, is discutable.

The reality is you can build Linux with gcc and clang. And that’s it. Years ago you could use Intel’s icc compiler, but that stopped being supported. Let’s stop pretending it’s an undergrad project.

Just writing a non-toy C preprocessor is non-trivial.

My question, which I didn’t still find anybody asking: how many compilers, including but not limited to the 2 most famous, were in the training set.

Certainly tcc. Probably also rui314's chibicc as it's relatively popular. sdcc is likely in there as well. Among numerous others that are either proprietary or not as well known.