“Oooh! we wanna help the environment! Look at how green we are! It’s gonna last you a lifetime. Such quality. Such emotional investment into your personal mouse!”
Bitch! You are just inventing stupid ideas about how to turn a hardware company into a service company, because you know that is where the money is.
Wait is this an onion?
Arent mouse already “forever” mice. Like what goes wrong in them? I’ve never had a wired laser mouse fail, and the batteries ones I usually lose the adapter or let it corrode before the mouse actually fails
And if anything I only buy a new mouse for aesthetics. Or when their old mouse is grody
Ask a razer user if their mouse/keyboard last forever.
Or when their old mouse is grody
That’s planned obsolescence. They cover the mouse in soft touch plastic that turns to glue in 5 years. It ensures that you buy a new mouse every 5 years while claiming they are reliable.
I read that acetone transforms the gluely soft touch coating to hard plastic. I did it to my old Logitech when it got grody and it is still not grody after 20 years.
They cover the mouse in soft touch plastic that turns to glue in 5 years
This is my pet peeve of modern electronics in general. Even my $3000 work-supplied Dell laptop is coated in this soft touch material that will inevitably turn into a gooey mess after a few years 🤦♂️
Also own a second-hand tablet computer that feels disgusting and sticky to hold because the soft touch coating has degraded so badly on it 😭
I fixed a bunch of ThinkPad laptops that were turning into sticky messes, I put a movie on, used a whole bunch of goo off and stripped all of the sticky plastic off of the devices. Now they feel great
I’ve had buttons stop working. The mechanism inside that registers the click is a mechanical switch and they eventually die
By “forever” they mean you will be paying them forever for the privilege of using the mouse. Unless you break it that is, or they feel like they no longer want to support it at which point it will likely become a forever brick.
Yes, mice are forever mice. That’s the problem, it’s just a one time sell.
I had the wheel button stop working on it once, it was still usable, just annoying, when I needed to do a middle click.
Also that happened after a decade of use.
The switches eventually fail, but most mice use the same Omron switches and they are easy enough to replace if you know how to solder. The teflon skates wear out too, but you can find replacement for most name brand mice online.
I really hope there aren’t people stupid enough to buy or even want that.
I’ll pass
Oh neat, I think I might subscribe to that community.
Wait a goddamned minute
My Halo account name is fuckmandatorysignins@personalDomain.com
Fuck you Microsoft, fuck you Logitech, if the Internet goes down, I’m fucked…
I always give “companyname@personaldomain.com”
That way datasets are harder to correlate and I know who leaked 😝
That’s what I’ve been doing since 2002. If I get spam, I set up a forward to their customer service.
Lol! I need to start doing something like this when one of those email addresses eventually ends up in a breach. :D
Be wary though, it might get your domain blacklisted for spam. I’ve been lucky so far.
Oh man I was hoping this would be a sub for alternatives to subscriptions, rather than just pointing out that everything is going to a subscription model.
It’s not against the rules of that community to post alternatives. I suspect the community members would love that.
Alternative to subscription based mouse…any other fucking mouse. Hell, I’d rather use that piece of crap they sell at walgreens for $15.99. It looks like crap, has only 2 buttons, is wired, but it doesn’t have a damn subscription.
are mice not supposed to have only 2 buttons??? (excluding scroll wheel)
Uh, what would I be paying for, exactly? I don’t really see what Software support a mouse really needs, as long as it doesn’t ship buggy. Also, I’ve been using my (Logitech, funnily) mouse for 6 years now, and if you ignore the few scratches it has gathered, it still works pretty much perfectly.
Also, if their solution for a longer lasting mouse really is repairability, isn’t that just their way of saying “we designed our other products to be thrown away”?
You’ve had more luck than us. My wife went through two Logitech G305s in like 2 years, so I switched her to a Razor DeathAddr and she’s been much happier.
At work, I use macOS so I went with MX Master 3 and had constant issues with the thumb button not working. It’s better now (I guess their SW improved?), and ironically I had far fewer issues with my Triathlon (when I WFH), which is much cheaper.
On my personal devices (Linux), I use Microsoft Intellimouse Pro. It has been solid for over 5 years. I plugged it in and it just works. The only thing remarkable about it is how little I think about it, it clicks, scrolls, and reads input consistently. If Logitech could do that, I’d probably buy more of their stuff, but I’ve mostly had issues.
You would be paying for the privilege of using a Logitech mouse of course!
The company has to grow indefinitely and you my friendly consumer are the back on which they will walk to do so.
Don’t worry I’m sure they’ll never acquire smaller and successful manufacturers that risk undermining their profit structures.
Tangential: Is there any community for mice akin to the mechanical keyboard community?
Would love to buy an alternative but every time I do any research it boils down to “razer or logitech” with everything else being orders of magnitude shittier.
Lol I actually had to check to make sure this wasn’t published on April 1st. Missed joke opportunity, this is hilarious
An idea for a mouse I will never buy in a million years
To be fair they only said having a subscription for the accompanying software was a ‘possibility’, not that it would need one, and that it would be likely to be in the ~$200 price range, and with upgradeability and repairability in mind, as well as reliant on software updates.
Honestly depending on how much they lean toward the subscription and/or software update reliance having a mouse designed to last a lifetime and be upgradeable and repairable would be nice, even at a rather higher price point.
I didn’t see Sonos being dropped from my list of companies to buy products from in 2024, is Logitech joining that list this year too?
On the right track it seems!
Haha more like a never mouse
I was intrigued by the idea, I was like, “oooh a modular mouse where it could be a trackball or vertical mouse or multi-sensor components with obvious replacement parts that they’d sell to make it easy on repair”!
Then I saw software and I’m like wtf? do I look like I need something else to Crowdstrike me? “Can’t work today boss, credit card didn’t update my mouse subscription hang on…”
Side question since this concept is obviously rent seeking… Why is there not a market for premium custom mice like there are for keyboards?
All the mice over the ~$80 range seem to only be gamer mice or focus on adding more and more buttons. Why aren’t there options that are customizable or more premium?
I get that no one wants a solid machined aluminum mouse but surely there is something more premium than adding more buttons.
But the Ploopy mouse already exists.
It’s trackball that are premium in fact
Custom keyboards took off because of mechanical switches. Back in the day people wanted mechanical switches because they last longer than membrane ones, and so you wound up with a bunch of companies producing relatively easy to manufacture mechanical switches. Those switches all felt and sounded a little different so you got people who wanted a specific feel and sound and it grew from there.
There hasn’t really been the same push with mice because even really cheap ones work really well. Optical sensors are way harder to produce than key switches, and while there are a few different ones on the market other than dpi and polling rate they kind of all act the same - it kind of either tracks right or it doesn’t. There’s no differentiation unlike switches that are “tactile” or “linear” or “scratchy”. And because of size restrictions you can’t really have the same kind of switches as keyboards use for the buttons. And unlike the really niche keyboard people who do their own PCB and machine their own case, making a good mouse on your own from scratch is way more difficult. They’re weird shaped and it’s much more difficult to change things like optical tracking algorithms compared to macros on a 40% keyboard. You can do a run of 100 super niche keyboards and make it work, but just the injection molds for one mouse mean you need to make 10000, which stops it being a project and makes it a business.
There are premium mice manufacturers, but in general they either are going super light, super ergonomic, or super functional - and honestly they have a hard time competing with a company like Logitech that can produce really similar features for a fraction of the cost and have a decent reputation to boot.
This concept should be expanded to every industry so the idea itself is abandoned and the thought of subscription shows its poor quality or subscription based
Vance Packard warned us, in his book, The Waste Makers.
