If Tim Cook made a list of all the things he expected to talk about at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), you can bet the Magic Mouse wasn’t on it. But thanks to tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee’s interview, Cook was faced with the considerable task of ranking the Magic Mouse alongside other “top” Apple products like the MacBook Air, the iPad, the iPhone, and the Vision Pro.
After a pretty pronounced pause, the Apple CEO refers to the mouse as “an incredible moment,” but his efforts to come up with the right comment for the product failed spectacularly. Infamous for its badly positioned charging port and design that seems to completely ignore the shape and comfort of the human hand, the Magic Mouse is one of the most memed Apple products out there. So which part of it did Cook decide to praise? The ergonomics.
Just gonna immortalize this here forever pic.twitter.com/OWHznWhMCR
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) June 12, 2024
In fairness, there really isn’t a lot to say about the Magic Mouse, but even a throwaway comment on the battery life, the “buttonless” design aesthetic, or literally anything else would have been better than defending the nonexistent ergonomics. But, hey, what’s bad for Apple is great for a laugh, and Marques himself posted a clip of the interview to X to “immortalize it forever.”
Incidents like this are always amusing, but at the same time, it’s a shame that big corporations can’t just be a little more real with us. As a product that’s still on the shelves, he can’t really make a joke about its flaws — but why not acknowledge them? Why not give it a redesign? At the very least, why not move the lightning port so we can actually use the damned thing while it’s charging! If they need any ideas, there are even engineers out there who fixed the Magic Mouses’s design themselves.
One comment Cook made during the interview was that “our objective is never to be first. Our objective is to be the best.” Come to think of it, that was probably the line he wanted people to quote, rather than “Getting the ergonomics … well done, uh, was key.”
But anyway, being best instead of first is an objective that Apple does indeed achieve with a lot of its products, so it’s a shame that the Magic Mouse doesn’t live up to that standard. Maybe one day they’ll decide to revisit it, but for now, Cook has at least given us enough fuel to keep the meme going for another decade or so.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.