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?
