Please. "Purposefully screwed over" is pretty dramatic and almost certainly not true. The mouse is sold as wireless. That seems to me a more likely reason it's impossible to use in a wired fashion. It also eliminates the need for a me to keep a giant pack of AA batteries at both my office and home office. It does require power occasionally, but then very briefly and almost never. The OS will also remind you almost comically early that the battery is getting low, and then you just plug it in when you go for lunch or a coffee run. When you get back you're good for another month or something like that.

My time has value. It has particularly high value when I'm in the middle of working on something. Interruptions in this state have especially high opportunity cost.

We could live in a universe where, when the "battery low" notification pops up I take a few seconds to plug in my mouse and go back to whatever I was working on. Instead, Apple purposefully chose to make me unable to use my mouse for a significant duration of time, at a moment that is NOT of my choosing.

On a laptop this is fine as I have the trackpad. On a desktop workstation (where my time is more valuable!) this means getting up and taking a walk, or getting a cup of coffee at the very least. Those are good activities to do, but only when they fit into my routine. As a sudden abrupt interruption, it is actually a cost. And at my hourly rates, a particularly high one greater than the amount I paid for the mouse in the first place.

So yeah, I do consider that "purposefully screwing over" the user. They could have made another perfectly reasonable design choice that would have had greater functionality, but opted not to for purely ephemeral reasons of branding and image.

Don’t use it wired; it lasts a very long time. A port on the side would break its continuous curve, the sharp contrast of a dark port would be visually jarring (especially since the mouse is small and the overall tone is bright and smooth; it’s relative), and invite unnecessary long-term imperfections (e.g. deformities to the sharp aluminum cut, dust, etc.).

I’m very thankful Apple doesn’t always listen to what “people” want. True creativity (especially in a pervasive aesthetic sense) is rare and most can’t envision new concepts or feelings before experiencing them.

> A port on the side would be break its continuous curve, the sharp contrast of a dark port would be visually jarring

This is literally the stuff people make jokes about when they talk about Apple.

Yes, it sounds silly to most. Most people would also say an asymmetric phone notch and chin doesn’t bother them. That’s why pushing pragmatic and perfectionist design (it’s a delicate balance, and Apple isn’t perfect) is difficult. But on a deeper level, most people feel good design and experiences without ever noticing them.

It’s much more pervasive than you think.

I dislike Apple for many of their user hostile decisions, but for this I love them. I'm bothered by phone bezels not being consistent, for one example, and Apple are the only ones who seem to care about it as well.