The smaller size is actually ideal for my fingertip grip, and I actually like the rechargeable battery. It lasts well over a month on a single charge and then charges really quickly (if it ever does go flat, just chuck it on the charger while you make a coffee, 2-3 min is enough to last the rest of the day). And I love the scroll wheel.
The microswitches going bad is a massive downside.
I read somewhere that it's caused by static build up due to Logitech using much lower voltage/current than what the switches were originally designed for... After a bit of experimentation, I found that simply breathing warm air into the side of the left button clears up my issues for a few days....
Which is stupid annoying workaround, but what else am I going to do, buy a second one which probably has the same flaw?
I went to get a new one to keep at my office last year and noticed that the buttons had changed from clicky ones to silent ones. That drove me nuts and I returned the new version. However, the issue you mention with static and the buttons might explain the change. I thought it was just a vendor making a good device cheaper to manufacture. Maybe it was a better version after all?
But I've found one post complaining about bad switches on the Anywhere 3S and a few complaining about the MX Master 3S (which uses the same switches?).
I'm sticking with my current mouse for now, since I know it's quirks.
The silent buttons feel just right for me and the higher sensitivity has been a game changer in terms of the overall experience of using the mouse. The movement feels so much smoother and more natural than with the Anywhere 3.
I also use LinearMouse (I'm on macOS) for configuring the mouse and it covers all my current needs. My configuration mostly consists of:
- Disable pointer acceleration
- Set tracking speed to 1
- Reverse scrolling
- Scroll by 4 lines
- Button #4 for Cmnd+W (close current tab, which works in most applications)
- (No explicit change) Button #3 default action (go back)
Together with the MX Keys Mini it's a liberating feeling being happy with the peripherals and not wanting to change anything (except for a few small annoyances with the top keyboard row).
I like the 2s feel better. I like the 3s USB C portable better.
Nickel metal rechargeables are a good AA/AAA substitute for devices designed to tolerate their lower voltage. For more power, 14500/18650/21700 cylindrical lithium cells are my go-to.
Personally though, I find it more convenient to have a charging cable on hand vs keep some charged batteries on standby. When the built-in battery eventually goes bad, I am confident that I could replace it myself (not a universal position).
Any device that can't is arguably broken as designed. Much of the energy (the majority, in a higher current application) in an alkaline battery is found under 1.2V.
See discharge curves: https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Duracell%20Ultra%...
NiMH actually stays above 1.2V longer for all but the lightest loads: https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Eneloop%20AA%20BK...
Any consumer electronic using standard format batteries is superior by default. Because 10 or 20 years from now, it still have brand new full batteries lying around.
I'm not magic; can't replace built-in batteries without a soldering iron (or at least, relatively uncommon replacement parts).
As always, engineering tradeoffs are involved. I was recently looking for a casual point-and-shoot camera from the ~2010s, but all the slimline ones used flat lithium removable batteries (as only the bulkier ones have space for AAs).
I share this preference. Replacing a battery has a device back in a working state a couple orders of magnitude faster than onboard charging, and when built-in batteries wear out, replacement is often difficult to impossible.
I always use NiMH rechargeables; alkalines are wasteful and sometimes leaky.
Personally I've never come around to their side of things, although I do recognise the inconvenience of charging cables while you are using a peripheral (Apple Mouse charging port location especially :D )
1) If the device battery is dead, I can swap it out in seconds and be up and running immediately.
2) Built-in batteries fail, and replacing them ranges from difficult to near-impossible and often involves damaging the device's casing to get the built-in battery out.
When I'm spending $100 on a computer mouse, I'd really like it to last longer than the life of the battery and not have to destroy the casing to get to the battery to replace it.
Now you have the best of both worlds: Economical rechargable use for the 90% of the time that the user's in their normal routine, and easily ability to swap temporarily to universally-available alkalines in exceptional situations.
Note: When I had one of these, I just used my own NiMH AAs and jammed a folded-up piece of cardstock against the detection switch, which worked perfectly fine.
At the time (well over a decade ago) there was still lots of skepticism around recharagables and the extra process involved in dealing with them... but the tech has gotten lots better since, at that time even low-self-discharge was sort of hard to find. I'm sure much of the industry has moved over by now.
I would love to end the senseless waste in surgery, but The Powers That Make Our Lives Suck For No Reason want everything to be single-use sterile objects.
The batteries are in a separate container that is attached to the bag of saline used for irrigation. It’s not in the surgical field.
Note that legally trash is still owned, usually by the person or entity which produced it, so it’s technically stealing. (Whether anyone cares is a different thing. If you picked bank letters instead of barely used batteries…)
You can quickly swap in a new pair, and recharge the other one. Some mice can even charge the batteries themselves. You get the best of all worlds.
(Yeah, the computer tells me when the mouse battery is getting low, but I do not have the discipline to remember to plug it in hours later when I'm done with the computer for the day.)
For certain activities like hiking having AA or AAA is preferred. If they run out of charge they are trivially replaced with a light weight inventory and this is probably sufficient to last your trip.
You don't need to keep them, you get warned many days in advance, so an overnight recharge of existing batteries works just as well
I use them almost everywhere nowadays. Most devices tolerate the slightly higher voltage and even expensive hardware usually cheaps out on proper battery circuitry.
For clarity, I plug my main receiver into my workstation and use Synergy to take the M&K over to an adjacent laptop in software, but the secondary receiver is useful when testing installers for NUC, Jetson, etc. Basically I've got a bare metal device on my desk plugged into a mini monitor and with one little dongle I can trivially get my keyboard/mouse on that device including in a preboot environment like the EFI firmware.
You can pair a single device to multiple receivers and the "switch" button on each device will let you cycle between each receiver. I use the same keyboard and mouse with both my personal computer and my work computer. Every time I need to switch, I just need to use the device switch button on the keyboard and the mouse.
Logitech also makes or made keyboards with 1-2-3 hot swap keys that allowed quick switching with a single press.
I've got to mention how reliable the switches used to be. I purchased a wired Logitech mouse in the 90's that lasted through three different computers.
More recent models fail quickly with such regularity that I just stopped purchasing the brand at all.
It's still tedious, as the metal strip is really small and is hard top manipulate, but far easier and less risky for the pcb than desoldering.
I had this happen to my shop PC mouse's left button. I was too lazy to get another mouse or desolder and put in a new switch, so I tried drilling a small hole in the top of the switch and squirted some Deoxit in there. That fixed it. Later, the right button went bad too, so I did the same thing. Now it's been a year and it's still working.
It’s not necessarily that switches have lowered in quality, it’s that you get less current flow at 1.8V or whatever than 5V and any added resistance exacerbates that.
Maybe adding another pull-up resistor in parallel with the existing one can buy more time per switch.
I have three recent electronic devices that I would like to keep using but cannot, as their battery has reached end of life, replacements are hard to find, and changing the battery involves performing surgery on the device that I'm not confident I can do safely.
If 3.7-4.2V is too much to handle, jump with a 1n4148 diode or two in series.
The battery door pops on and off with a fingernail.
They really do look like dead-ringers for AA batteries. I bet you could run the mouse off of a regular AA as long as you didn't try to plug it in!
Although the first one had its primary button stop working after 3 months. But they sent a replacement. I fear it won't last much more after the warranty period ends.
I'll also add that it works great over Bluetooth — look ma, no dongle!
I have the same problem (with a different mouse model/manufacturer). Sometimes you can even "repair" the switches without de-soldering them by opening up the case and bending the metal contact a bit. I put "repair" in quotes because the repaired switches don't seem to last as long as new ones but at least it's easy to do and doesn't need any tools besides a screw driver.
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?