Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber recently discussed the possibility of one day selling a mouse that customers can use “forever.” The executive said such a mouse isn’t “necessarily super far away” and will rely on software updates, likely delivered through a subscription model.
Speaking on a July 29 episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Faber, who Logitech appointed as CEO in October, said that members of a “Logitech innovation center” showed her “a forever mouse” and compared it to a nice but not “super expensive” watch. She said:
I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever. So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it’s a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse? The forever mouse is one of the things that we’d like to get to.
Having to pay a regular fee for full use of a peripheral could deter customers, though. HP is trying a similar idea with rentable printers that require a monthly fee. The printers differ from the idea of the forever mouse in that the HP hardware belongs to HP, not the user. However, concerns around tracking and the addition of ongoing expenses are similar.>>>>
Because watch technology is mature and isn’t changing. Nobody’s making a better watch every few years.
That generally isn’t true of computer hardware.
In the 1980s, you had maybe a one or two button mouse with mechanical optical encoder rings turned by a ball that gummed up and would stick.
After that:
A third mouse button showed up
A scrollwheel showed up
Optical sensors showed up.
Better optical sensors showed up, with the ability to function on arbitrary surfaces and dejittering.
Polling rate improved
Mice got the ability to go to sleep if not being used.
More buttons showed up, with mice often having five or more buttons.
Tilt scrollwheels showed up
Wireless mice showed up
Better wireless protocols showed up
Optical sensor resolutions drastically increased
Weight decreased
Foot pads used less-friction-inducing material.
Several updates happened to track changing ports (on PC, serial, PS/2, USB-A, and probably soon USB-C).
The transparent mouse bodies that were initially-used on many optical mice (to show off the LED and that they were optical) went away as companies figured out that people did not want to have flashing red mice. (I was particularly annoyed by this, modded a trackball that used a translucent ball to use a near-infrared LED back in the day).
If wristwatches had improved like that over the past 40 years, you likely wouldn’t be keeping an older one either.
If you think that there isn’t going to be any more change in mice, okay, maybe you can try selling people on the same mouse for a long time. I’m skeptical.
Most of those changes to mice make very little difference to regular users. And the low-priced mice most people use aren’t so different from the old ones. Wireless is a mixed blessing because it comes with having to recharge a battery which is often not replaceable. Polling rate and DPI is only of interest to niche users. Most people probably never tilt the wheel. So for many an old wired mouse will still do fine.
Anyway, Logitech’s “forever mouse”, if it’s really forever, doesn’t really fit with the idea that mouse technology evolves enough that you need to replace the mouse every few years. That said, it’s probably the subscription that’s forever, not the mouse.
In watches, smart watches are new and still developing, and some of them already have “premium” subscription services.
… and then everybody joined me in thinking that this would be a good place to stop and actively avoided the continued attempts to sell us on new features that further complicate things.
I don’t personally go down the wireless mouse route – in fact, in general, I’d rather not use wireless and especially Bluetooth devices, due to reliability, latency, security, needing-to-worry-about-battery-charge, and privacy (due to broadcasting a unique ID that any nearby cell phone will relay the position of to Google, Apple, or similar). But I’d say that aside from that, most of those are advantageous, and a lot of people out there don’t care (or don’t know about) wireless drawbacks, so for them, even those are a win.
The main complexity item I can think of is the buttons. Maybe back in the day, few set up Mouse Button #5 to be “drag window” in their window manager, as I did, so I could drag windows anywhere rather than on their titlebar. However, the browser “back” and “forward” functionality that I believe is the default in all desktop environments these days seems pretty easily-approachable.
Yeah it is mostly the extra buttons that annoy me personally, I don’t really know why. I have better ways of doing the things you mention but I’m sure there could theoretically be some use for them. I’ve played games where they might’ve been useful, but it seems like no software is designed to rely on them and I always found their placement made it too easy to hit them by accident. Maybe my hands are the wrong shape or something.
I haven’t hit that, but one thing that might help if you don’t like that – you might be able to set it up such that they only operate in your environment when chorded – like, when you hit multiple buttons at the same time. Like, only have “left click plus back” send “back” and “left click plus forward” send “forward”, or something akin to that.
These days, I use sway on Linux, which provides for a tiled desktop environment – the computer sets the size of windows, which are mostly fullscreen, and I don’t drag windows. But when I did, and before mice had the convention of using “back” and “forward” on Button 4 and Button 5, I really liked having the single-button-to-drag-anywhere functionality, though I never really found a use for the fifth button. If I were still using a non-tiled environment, I’d probably look into doing chording or something so that I could still do my “drag anywhere on the window” thing.
I’m an Xfce user, in the habit of dragging windows around with the “super” key + left mouse button.
For instant access to the browser back button, I have it positioned in the far top-left corner so that just swiping the mouse in that direction hits it without having to look at it. Unless it’s on the other monitor, which is mildly annoying when it happens but you know, probably not by enough to change my decades-old habit of buying the cheapest and simplest mouse that’s easily available and looks like it might not fall apart in a week, much the same way as I tend to shop for socks: reluctantly, when it’s necessary.