This page permanently redirects to gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/mac-mouse-madness.gmi.

Mac mouse madness

One day last week I was in the office of a new colleague discussing a project. He uses some kind of Macbook, which sits on a little elevated platform next to a large external monitor. Part way through our meeting, the batteries for his wireless mouse died. He reached across his desk for a USB cable, and I fully expected him to plug it into the front of a mouse, in exactly the same position that the cable on a conventional wired mouse attaches to the mouse body, and continue using it while it charged. Instead, to my astonishment, he picked the mouse up, plugged the cable into its underside, propped it up on its side at a roughly 45 degree angle, and switched to using the Macbook's touchpad.

I was absolutely flabbergasted!

I'm very used to Apple manufacturing deliberately dysfunctional hardware in order to make more money selling solutions (e.g. many of their computers lack any and all standard I/O ports, so to get anything done you have to buy a fistfull of overpriced adapters, many of which will eventually be lost by people travelling with their computers, requiring them to buy more), but I just can't figure out what their angle is here with this bafflingly bad mouse design. Do they expect people to buy two mice and hot swap them? Is it some kind of weird internal joke, to see just how bad a product their marketing wizards can convince people to buy?