Apple hasn’t fixed its biggest design flaw
Apple's Magic Mouse still charges via a port on the bottom. And even if that port is now USB-C, I have to ask - why?
Apple updated its long-standing Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard with USB-C (as it had to) but bizarrely it has left the Magic Mouse with what is generally acknowledged to be one of Apple’s worst-ever design flaws – it still charges via a port on the bottom. This has been confirmed to us via an Apple Store worker as well as Apple’s AR preview of the new Mac, pictured above.
That’s fine if you regularly charge your mouse. But most of us don’t. And there will always be the time it runs out and, well, you’re stuck as you can’t use it while it’s plugged in. Of course, you do get alerts telling you that it’s about to run out of power, but it’s not exactly that helpful for the times you do run out of power. It’s clearly about aesthetics.
While other manufacturers like Logitech constantly iterate their mice, Apple hasn’t bothered for almost a decade. This is the third generation of the Magic Mouse. But it’s the same as the second-generation mouse aside from the port.
And that mouse was introduced in 2015, with only changes to colours (space gray to match the long-defunct iMac Pro from 2017 and then multicoloured from the 2021 iMac M1 onwards). The switch to USB-C from Lightning for the peripherals should probably have happened back at that time in 2021, not least because all new Macs were USB-C years before that; the first USB-C Mac was the MacBook back in 2015.
It wouldn’t be a problem if it was always an option to buy or not to buy. But if you get an iMac – including the latest iMac M4 – then it is a compulsory purchase as part of the package. The latest iMac peripheral bundle also carries over something we weren’t so keen on from the previous 2023 iMac; while most of the keyboards come with Touch ID, the base level model doesn’t have this. Or Gigabit Ethernet (less crucial these days). So you need to pay more to upgrade if you want either of those things. Or if you want to buy another mouse.
Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief 
