Apple just announced a new Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard, plus a Magic Trackpad, alongside the new iMac 24-inch for 2024 which is its first M4-toting Mac – and there’s some good news here, but also a very annoying development.
The positive news is that the new magic peripherals – which come bundled with the iMac M4, or the mouse and keyboard do – now have USB-C charging ports, as opposed to Lightning connectors.
So, we can all breathe easy on the charging front, as the proprietary nonsense gets shoved thankfully to one side, and you can use any old USB-C cable to juice up the new Apple peripherals.
The problem remains, though, that the charging port is located on the bottom of the mouse, an inexplicable design decision from Apple – and one that the company is mystifyingly holding fast with, despite a volume of complaints from mouse owners.
Why is it bad to have the port on the bottom? Well, this means you can’t charge the Magic Mouse while using it, which is obviously quite a downer.
A non-issue? Hardly
Can’t Apple think its way around this problem? Well, of course the company could, but it’s seemingly unwilling to change the design of the mouse over the issue – which clearly it views as something of a non-issue, even if mouse owners don’t agree.
The design of the Magic Mouse (and Keyboard) remains the same, by the way, except for the change to USB-C. You get the peripherals in matching colors to go with the new iMacs.
We guess we can be thankful that Apple has had a rethink of the memory loadout in the new iMac M4, and equipped it with 16GB as a baseline amount – which is great, and probably necessary for Apple Intelligence, anyway – but just a smattering of thought regarding a port relocation for the Magic Mouse would be very welcome, too. We’ll probably be waiting quite some time for the next take, though…