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.
