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450 points sammycdubs | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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bityard ◴[] No.45015917[source]
My favorite mouse is the Logitech Anywhere MX. It's highly comfortable despite being pretty small. The back/forward buttons on the side are indispensable for web browsing, file management, and switching weapons in first-person shooters. It takes two AA batteries which last for months and take seconds to swap out. The dongle is small and has good range. The scroll wheel switches between clicky and free-scrolling.

It's pretty much the perfect mouse, IMO, to the point that I built up a back stock by hoarding new and open box on eBay. But there are two main problems:

1) The the microswitches go bad after a couple years. It's possible to replace them, but it's tedious and you run a very real risk of damaging the PCB (as I have already done).

2) The dongle is USB Type-A only. Logitech actively refused to make a USB-C unifying receiver. I assume they wanted to shift to bluetooth but they still made unifying receiver devices for years and years after bluetooth was everywhere, so I dunno.

As far as newer iterations, the Anywhere MX 2S is somewhat tolerable, but it has a built-in battery which must be charged every couple of months, which is annoying. All of the newer Anywhere MX mice are even worse because they changed the basic functionality/features of the mouse with each revision. Oh, yes and they cost $90 (!) retail now.

So basically one of my side-projects, one of these days, is going to be to try building an open source Anywhere MX clone. Should be a fun yet challenging endeavour. I know there are a bunch of online communities making their own keyboards from scratch and at great expense, is there such a thing for mice?

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stronglikedan ◴[] No.45017788[source]
Are you sure the microswitch thing is as widespread as you imply? Or could you have just got a bad unit? I have one at work and one at home, and have used them both daily for many more than a couple of years.
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stavros ◴[] No.45018394[source]
I had two mouses get that problem about a year in. One was the MX Master 3S, a 100 € mouse. For that price point, it's entirely unacceptable for the mouse to only last a year. Good thing it had a two year warranty, but it's such a hassle to be without a mouse for weeks.
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1. xp84 ◴[] No.45019198[source]
My first MX Master 3S had a bad right or left click button on Day 1, which would miss clicks constantly. Thankfully it was pretty easy to get a warranty replacement for this, which came as a full retail-boxed unit, so I now have an extra receiver too (I understandably had to mail in the useless defective mouse itself).