Apple's new Magic Mouse, with a Lightning port on its underside, is unusable and ridiculous while charging
So here's the thing. — This is ridiculous. It's obviously ridiculous. It looks wrong, and was so absurd I at first assumed it was a joke image, or that someone...
Context & Ripple Effects
When Apple redesigned the Magic Mouse in 2015, reviewers immediately flagged the charging port placement as absurd — but the company shipped it anyway, and the underside Lightning port became a running joke that outlived several product cycles. The related coverage shows just how durable the decision was: even alongside the M3 iMac in late 2023, the Keyboard, Mouse, and Trackpad still carried Lightning (Lightning ports persisting on the M3 iMac's accessories), eight years after this review.
The arc finally closed in October 2024, when Apple moved all three accessories to USB-C at unchanged prices ($199/$99/$149 pricing intact through the USB-C update). This 2015 piece is the origin point of that nine-year lag — evidence that Apple treats peripheral ports as design-frozen commitments rather than iterative hardware.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the $99 Magic Mouse get a mouse they must flip upside down and take offline whenever the battery runs low — a direct usability tax on every charge cycle.
Second-order effects
- Apple's refusal to revise the accessory line kept customers tethered to Lightning adapters and cables, a market the company itself monetized with items like the $29 USB-C-to-Lightning dongle (Apple's own $29 USB-C-to-Lightning adapter).
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple only migrates accessory ports under external convergence pressure — the same dynamic that produced the USB-C Pencil and the 2024 accessory refresh — making regulator- and ecosystem-driven standardization, not user complaint, the effective forcing function on Apple hardware design.
The trend: Apple's accessory port choices are set once at design time and then defended against criticism for the better part of a decade until industry-wide USB-C convergence forces the move.