The thing is, a company that likes to sell itself as having stellar product design should be held to a standard of criticism for stellar product design.
And contrary to popular opinion good design is both usable and looks good, many just skip to the looks good part and call it a day. When do users notice their mouse is empty? When they want to use it. Charging preventing use in thst case is just bad design.
But when does this happen? In the middle of work, which you can't drop for a few hours to charge mouse. And you probably wouldn't want to switch to touchpad if you bought mouse in the first place. So user suspends notification and intends to charge mouse at the end of the day, and then forgets about it.
The only reason for this port placement is a marketing and anti-consumer one - to prevent people using mouse permanently plugged in.
>The only reason for this port placement is a marketing and anti-consumer one - to prevent people using mouse permanently plugged in.
I think you are reading way too much into this. That is likely not the reason.
The previous iteration of the Magic Mouse, which is actually quite old and created in the Steve Jobs era, was basically identical to the current one, but took AA batteries and had a door in the same spot underneath the mouse. When they decided to make the thing rechargeable, that was likely the easiest/least costly/most obvious spot to put the new battery and charging apparatus without changing any other parts of the mouse. You can bet accessories division is not the most resourced/staffed part of hardware engineering at Apple, so they would have to make do with whatever they are given. The calculus must have been "is this going to cause an issue for the user?" and as the charging is not frequent they decided to go with it. I am fairly confident their product has decent/good customer satisfaction rating, as is, and they have not received many complaints from the real user in this long time, just loud people in the news/social media. If not, it likely would have been fixed by now.
As a former student of product design I can assure you that someone in that meeting sold a "they cannot leave it plugged in" as an advantage. Granted, maybe it wasn't the only advantage, e.g. lower production costs, easier to reach the target IP rating or something, but it definitly was discussed about.
It would be even wilder if it wasn't, since this is a decision that is so different from what the rest of the market is doing. That would suggest a significant level of neglect in their product planning department.
But on the other hand if any comapny could get away with such neglect it would be them. The curious thing is that Apple has such a reputation for good design that people will defend things they would laugh out of the room if e.g. Microsoft did the exact same thing with a slightly less sleek styling. When they defend the following sentence you know they have become the ultimate consumer: You're holding it wrong.
And contrary to popular opinion good design is both usable and looks good, many just skip to the looks good part and call it a day. When do users notice their mouse is empty? When they want to use it. Charging preventing use in thst case is just bad design.