I saw the New Mac Mini on display
I love the idea of it, and I love how tiny it is. Will probably get one when money isn’t so tight.
But I was curious if the power button was accessible without lifting it. And it genuinely isn’t. Why does Apple like shoving important IO and buttons underneath the device. Good thing it’s light?
Oh and a funny thing was the staff had to loosen its mount on the table so you could turn it on.
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Because Apple design is opinionated. The charge port is on the bottom of the Magic Mouse because they want you to charge it and disconnect the cable rather than leaving it connected all the time and causing the battery to swell. The power button is on the bottom of the Mac mini because they want you to leave it on because it idles at essentially nothing.
People have decades of habits built up from time, and Apple’s designs have choices made to try and break those habits through negative reenforcement.
Yes, but what if the mouse could stop its charging cycle depending on its use, so it does not damage its battery. Or what if users could change the function of the power button to an short-press for sleep-button and long-press for power off.
There are better ways to change peoples habits while still maintaining basic functionallities.
Because they don’t want you to. It’s not just for those reasons, those are just primary ones. They also don’t like the look of having it connected to a charge cable all the time, and users don’t “change the function” of anything on average so a solution that involves user choice doesn’t really work for them either.
If you’re looking for choice for the sake of choice when there is an obvious solution they can enforce through design instead, you’re looking at the wrong company.
You identified the issue right there, using the power button regularly is “normal” for similar devices. So how do they make it clear that it’s not “normal” for this device? Simple, make it hard to do.
I’m not saying you have to like it or even appreciate it, this is one of the most divisive things about Apple. I completely understand why people don’t like it and choose another solution as a result. It is the reality of how they design things though.
Battery swelling in lithium ion batteries occurs due to age, not leaving batteries charging. The battery is designed to stop charging between 95-100% and it has a built in processor to do that.
Regarding the power button and leaving the computer turned on, there are multiple reasons someone might want to turn a computer off when they are not actively using it.
Yes but it repeatedly discharges and recharges that 5%, which generates heat and causes swelling. I’ve had to repair enough laptops left constantly plugged in to know this is an extremely common issue.
I never said I thought Apple was accounting for every use case here or that it was the best way to achieve this, so you’re arguing with the wrong person. I’m just explaining what they do and why they do it.
I worked for Apple for 12 years, most of that as a liaison between front line hardware service locations and AppleCare engineering. Battery swelling is a normal Li-ion failure mode that is not related to leaving a device connected to its charger. If Apple had any evidence of that they would decline warranty service on swollen batteries based on the system report of how long it was connected to external power.
The Magic Mouse has the charging port on the bottom because the first gen model used AA batteries and not a built in rechargeable battery. When they moved to the rechargeable battery model, they didn’t want to redesign the whole thing so they put the port on the bottom. It’s bad enough design that Tim Cook uses a Logitech.
It's not so much "constantly leaving it plugged in" as "constantly leaving it at a high state of charge" (near 100%) which naturally follows from the first.
In recent versions of iOS and macOS, Apple have added features to keep the battery at 80% charge as much as possible for this very reason - it massively extends battery life to not be at 100% all the time.
Also because if the cable plugged into the forward edge, leaving the cable in, like 20% of users would, will destroy the charge port before warranty is done.