I too use the mx 3. It’s a great mouse that can also travel easily in my laptop bag.

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?

I'm a pretty big fan of the M500 series myself.. I like the weighted scroll wheel. I actually wish it were maybe 15-20% bigger and slightly heavier myself.

Had to use my old TI 89 one day. Haven't used it in 10 years. Took it out of storage, put in 4 AAA usb-c rechargable batteries, worked like a charm. Could you do the same with your hard to replace custom battery?

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.

> Nickel metal rechargeables are a good AA/AAA substitute for devices designed to tolerate their lower voltage.

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...

I too was surprised by this view when I started at Oculus, where the game controller folks who had come over from Xbox were adamant that players would rather swap in a fresh pair of AAs than plug into a charging cable.

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 )

I, too, prefer disposables, but for a somewhat different reason. One very commonly used surgical item is a sterile suction/irrigator. It's sealed with 8 AA's at the factory, used for 2-3 minutes during laparoscopic surgery, and disposed of. So pretty much anyone who works in a surgical suite that does laparoscopy has a personally unlimited supply of AA's that would be thrown away anyway.

> it intrigued me that you prefer replaceable AA batteries to built-in rechargeables

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.

If you have a a device that does not tolerate the lower voltage, check out NiZn rechargables. They top out at ~1.7 V when full and keep their voltage quite high until they are almost flat. (At which point they should be immediately recharged, they don't take deep discharge 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.

Replaceable rechargeable batteries are the best choice (assuming the weight doesn't bother you).

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.

I always have at least a half-dozen NiMH AA batteries sitting charged in the drawer ready to go. When the mouse stops working, I grab a couple of charged batteries, slap them in, put the drained ones in the charger and then carry on with whatever I was doing. With a built-in battery, when the battery goes dead, I have to mess around with finding another mouse while this one charges.

(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.)

The thing with AA is that it gives you options. You can use rechargeable in it if you’d like. Avoiding proprietary batteries is a good thing because they are not always available or easy to service for the end user compared to AA.

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.

> cable on hand vs keep some charged batteries on standby.

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

My Logitech G603 runs quite happily on Eneloops, for the best of both worlds.

ist that the whole point of unifying recovers as well? or am I missing something?

My G5 lasted for more than a decade, I think? It didn't even go bad, I bought a new mouse and used its switches to fix the (at that point one year old) Logitech trackball I had bought much later.

Hmm... $30 and only being sold by third-party sellers there. That's not encouraging. Hope that's a temporary inventory shortage because of pent-up demand and not a sign that they barely intend to make any of these. Because I have a half drawer worth of various of the compact USB-A receivers and have literally never seen any USB-C equivalents in real life yet... It's time.

My speculation: this is due to the lower and lower voltages that “long battery life” wireless mice run.

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 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.

Nope, it's a known logitech problem. A couple of my Logitech mice started to get double-click issues later in their life. They cheap out with the switches, the Kailh ones don't have those issues.

It's highly variable. Some last much longer than others. The microswitches they use are very common jellybean parts and Logitech probably changes manufacturers all the time.

I disagree. I'm still using hardware that I bought at the turn of the century (a wireless mouse and an MP3 player) because they are powered by rechargeable AAA cells. If they used a built-in battery, I would have had to replace the battery, which is much more complex than changing a AAA cell.

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.

I consider them a minus because the proprietary batteries will likely fail before the rest of the mouse does. Using standard batteries means you’re not at the mercy of Logitech’s warranty when that happens. I wish more devices use standard batteries, but planned obsolescence is a hell of a drug.

Support for standard battery cells is seriously underrated! Especially when you are on-the-go and your mouse dies, all you need to do is swap in a fresh rechargeable AA/AAA. No need to deal with a cable or waiting for a recharge.

My wireless controller eventually convinced me that AA/AAA rechargeable batteries give the same benefit, but you can swap them in a few seconds instead of getting stuck waiting for a recharge.