Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/an-ergonomic-shoe-for-apples-painful-magic-mouse.html
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I’m no longer in the Apple garden, but this story reminds me of that damned “hockey puck” mouse that came with my G3 tower. Instant carpal tunnel combined with a near-useless super-short cord. Ecch.
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Does one still have to stop everything in order to plug in the charging cable into the underside?
One of the more stupid designs ever.
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I can’t use any mice any more, sure Apple did have some of the very worst ones, but they are all terrible for me now.
I use a trackpad instead (annoyed me when MS stopped making their keyboard/trackpad so I pulled an Apple keyboard from a pile in work and got their trackpad to go with it).
Scroll wheels: the very devil himself.
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you still have to stop everything. but you don’t have to turn it over or plug anything in. it uses apple’s wireless charging puck.
And plunking it onto a nearby MagSafe puck when I’m done with it is a much nicer experience than digging out a Lightning cable every time it dies. But boy is it silly that it’s come to this.
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Yet another case why my ergo interview with Apple went poorly. I suggested that empowering their users should be priority. Industrial design flash > usefulness, always.
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Now look here, it’s entirely your own fault if your hands do not comply with Apple’s design standards.
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Oh god, yes. The first Mac I ever owned (fruit colored iMac) I brought it home, set it up, and had to stop using it after a couple hours because that damn mouse made my hand hurt so much. Went out the next morning & bought a third party mouse as a replacement. By far the worst mouse I ever used.
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As I’ve said before, Apple’s mouse department is where they send the incompetent designers they can’t fire for one reason or another.
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ohyes. that does sound like a reasonable hypothesis.
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“You’re holding it wrong.”
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I’ve stopped getting their mice because I found them so frustrating to use. Instead I use a cheap Logitech mouse with my Mac. It has two buttons and a scroll wheel that do the expected functions every time I click or spin the wheel and it doesn’t kill my hand.
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You didn’t say it to Apple in terms they like to hear things. You told them they are holding it wrong and they need to change.
The “right” way to pitch it is:
Apple makes the best looking gear, everyone wants it. For a not insignificant part of the population once they get it their hands are not quite the right size, or it needs them to make shapes with their arms they can’t make (putting the blame where it belongs here: “not Apple”). So we are missing out on a chance to sell them all another wonderful Apple Mouse, or keyboard, or other fantastic device. The perfect blend of ascetics and affordances for the user’s inadequate hand and arm shapes. Something that clearly looks far better than anyone else’s ugly ergonomic devices, something people will be willing to pay a substantial premium for. Maybe something that costs 3x what a regular Apple mouse costs, and if they trade on the old one they can get it for “merely” 2x the price, wait! Wait! Trade-in? Coupon? Who am I kidding, Apple wouldn’t demean themselves with such things. 3x the price. If the customer has a tale of woe that impresses the genius in store they can authorize a one time discount (customer sat is king!). We don’t want that old mouse back, it has donut’s job, it sold the new one!
In other words “Apple is doing nothing wrong, but they can do things even righter! Making more money and making even happier customers!”
Also, somehow work in that this new line of ergonomic items are not intended to replace the current “pack in” perhprials so they don’t need to hit the same size or budget points. A win for everyone!
(Am I joking? Sort of, people are sensitive to how you pitch things, and this is the kind of angle that Apple likes internally, improving things and making more money; on the other hand Apple knows full well that non-ergo mice, keyboards, whatnot are problems for some percentage of people, and they have a handle on the size of that percentage, and they know what it costs to develop and maintain a product line, so I’m pretty sure they have decided not to fund ergo mice while at the same time doing awesome accessibility features for things like using a smartwatch with only one hand, or accessing a phone while blind – they are driven mostly by profit, they may pour millions of dollars into improving things for the blind, but there are a lot of blind people and no one other then Apple could help them use the phone without sight, while people do absolutely have other choices for ergo mice, or from Apple’s point of view people that are going to buy a desktop Mac but need a ergo mouse can use another mouse and still pay Apple for a Mac, but if they needed a “blind person phone” they couldn’t buy one and also an iPhone)
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What I’ve gotten from this entire exchange is that there is actually something on the market that is made for women’s (usually smaller) hands and yet sold to everyone as the default.
That is news indeed.
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That’s… not an unreasonable way to frame it, actually. I’ll keep that in mind. I’m not sure the decision to forgo offering any ergonomic improvement is strictly a rationally weighted one, though.
I’m also very familiar, of late, with the current assistive device market and Apple’s impact on it. Companies are really poor at assessing profit and risk when it comes to improving accessibility.
I’ll still hold that a knee-jerk hostility towards “empowering users” is still not a good look. Some of their best work, like their voice over system, does exactly that.
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Apple is a very gut feel company, not so much into doing studies and focus groups, and more into having directors and VPs make guesses at how profitable something could be.
It even works shockingly well for them.
It also means they may well decide ego mice won’t make them money when it could turn out that would make 10x the profit from their non-ergo magic mice. Or they might be totally right and Apple Ergo mice might be really nice but nobody ends up buying them (maybe given the past history of Apple mice people make the well reasoned choice that two decades of fail won’t stop overnight; or maybe based on the sky high prices, or maybe Apple’s core market will recoil from an Apple product that looks like it was designed by OXO no matter how much sense it makes!).
Absolutely. It is fantastically useful for people with vision issues. It is also very useful for testing purposes, it is frequently easier to drive integration tests from voiceover properties then from screen matchers. I kind of think developers are even less important to Apple most of the time then the blind though 
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