Apple will be announcing new Macs next week, and that could mean it’s finally time for them to update their Magic accessories (Mouse, Keyboard, and Trackpad) in some manner. Odds are, they’ll just get revved with USB-C instead of Lightning, but it’s always possible that they’ll update them in other ways as well. I mean, the odds are they won’t change anything feature-wise, but hey, this whole lineup is 9 years old at this point, so it’s not absurd to think they might get a change at some point (insert “on an infinite time scale” here).

You probably already know where I’m going with this, but let me attack this nearly decade-old problem from another angle, which I hope will illustrate the frustration people have with one of these products.

Let’s take the Magic Trackpad, which I own and use sometimes when super smooth scrolling is helpful for a video I’m making. The charging port is on the back, and on the several occasions a year that I need to charge it up, I simply plug it in with a cable while I work. This is not controversial in the least.

Now let’s say that the new Magic Trackpad comes out next week and due to some change in the physical size or internal components, now the charging port is on the bottom of the trackpad. Now, if you need to charge up, you simply turn the trackpad upside down, plug it in, and wait to be able to use it again. It fast charges so you probably only need a couple minutes to get an hour of life out of it, so no big deal, right?

Would you consider this a regression over the current product? Would you go so far as to say you prefer it now that you can’t use the trackpad while it’s charging?

Of course not! Clearly, even for a product that can charge quickly, it’s better to be able to use it while it’s charging than to not.

So yes, it’s a meme to complain about the Magic Mouse charging method, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to be annoyed by it and wish that Apple would make a mouse that behaves like all other mice out there (and all of Apple’s products as well) and let me charge it as I used it.

I understand that the current design makes that tricky, which is why they made the choice they made 9 years ago when they first released this product, but all design is compromise. May I remind you about the first Apple Pencil, which looks ridiculous when charging, but worked. People, including me, argued it wasn’t as bad as everyone said, but I’ll be damned if the next version of the Apple Pencil didn’t make everything much better.

I’m not telling you that you need to think the current Magic Mouse is the worst design in human history, I’m just saying that we can ask for more. You might not be super bothered by the way the Magic Mouse charges today, but would your life be worse if it could charge while you use it? Would your life be worse if people who do find this annoying felt better?