Let me explain exactly why Apple ships the Magic Mouse charging port on the bottom, because no one seems to get it.
This is not an oversight. Apple has shipped this exact design since 2015. They updated the mouse in October 2024 to USB-C and kept the port on the bottom anyway. They actively block the mouse from working when it receives power, which kills every third-party case that tries to move the port to the side. Apple watcher John Gruber has said Apple designers tried front-port versions and rejected all of them because every one looked worse.
Ten years of memes. A decade of competitor mockery. An entire cottage industry of accessory makers trying to fix this. Apple held the line on every single attempt.
The reason is the entire Apple thesis. Every other hardware company asks "is it usable?" Apple asks "is anything visible that I wouldn't put on a museum shelf?" When usability and visibility collide, they hide the usability. iMac power button on the back since 1998. Headphone jack deleted in 2016. Every port stripped from the MacBook Pro for five years before they admitted defeat. Touch Bar replaced function keys for a cleaner look and died after five years.
The Magic Mouse is the purest version of the discipline. The cost is a few minutes of charging downtime every couple of months. The benefit is the mouse looks beautiful 100% of the time it is in your hand. Apple ran that trade in 2015 and has refused every chance to renegotiate it.
Run the math on what this aesthetic discipline buys them. Apple sells a $99 mouse that has to be flipped on its back to charge. Logitech sells better mice for $40 with the port in the right place. Apple is worth $4.3 trillion. Logitech is worth $15 billion. A 280x gap on the same category of product.
The trade was never even close.
I think Hamilton could be the place for this stuff. They have the electricity infrastructure left dormant from the steel plant capacity falling. There is loads of industrial places. Location is good. Water is abundant.
Plus they once made all sorts of amazing things there and builder DNA is there.
Love this!
Thanks to LLMs, societyโs intelligence is merging online, creating a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. The goal is to make tacit knowledge explicit.
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir menโs blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.
All of our products are based on BASICS Protocol. As others adopt the framework, the potential for a mobile computer increases. The fact that this all points toward button phones not smart phones confounds many but will be painfully obvious as time passes.
Babb is an industrial software company and an open-source foundry. We build practical software, standards, and hardware-oriented systems that help people start, run, and grow real operations under real constraints.
Github refreshed!
https://t.co/7DTxadY6Mm