During a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber shed some possible insight into the company’s view on one of its most important products. Saying that “the mouse built this house,” Faber shares the planning behind a Forever Mouse, a premium product that the company hopes will be the last you ever have to buy. There’s also a discussion about a subscription-based service and a deeper focus on AI.
For now, details on a Forever Mouse are thin, but you better believe there will be a catch. The Instant Pot was a product so good that customers rarely needed to buy another one. The company went bankrupt.
Oh God if they put AI in the MX Master Mice then I’m boned.
I’m curious what monumentally terrible ideas they have for adding machine learning or LLM features to HIDs.
I’ll go out of my way to avoid ever owning any of them, but I’m curious.
Fuck that, no thanks! How about you build repairable mice that can last forever instead?
User-serviceable switches would be so nice…
premium mouse that receives constant updates
Come on. How many firmware updates can we really expect for a mouse?
I’ve had an m570 for about 10 years. Every time it broke, I fixed it. Why do we need a subscription?
This from a company would refused to update their drivers for a USB speaker system for 7, even though it was still actively being sold at store.
I had bought it a few months earlier at a Fry’s on sale. I think the sku was just about 2 years old, just expiring on their support policy, as a new OS dropped.
Their customer support told to me kick sand.
Fuck Logitech. Their Mice are the only thing I’ve continued to use because they are actually reliable. But now they’re trying to enshitify that behind a subscription, so that’s it.
This is not about you, but about them. It’s not that you need a subscription. It’s that they need you to have a subscription.
But they need to convince me that the subscription is worthwhile!
Not if they and their competitors remove all the other options.
Nah. There will always be companies just selling a mouse.
You wouldn’t print a mouse.
If you are going to ask questions maybe you are not the target demographic.
Damned straight! I’ll stick with my boring old non-ai grandpa mouse.
I used an HP dead stock “this ships with every computer we sell” optical mouse for twenty years before it broke.
All my mice are similar ages, even my Logitech wireless.
I did just have a 15 year old one die, but it got used about 8 hours a day all that time.
How many firmware updates can we really expect for a mouse?
Almost none, why the hell would a mouse ever need firmware updates except to fix fuckups? It has one job, translate clicks and movements into signals for the computer.
Damn Logitech, you’ve been my go-to for peripherals for a couple of decades now
Don’t fuck this up
You know they will, just making a good product isn’t enough, they need to somehow sell us more bullshit so they can make infinitely more money than ever all the time. So Logitech will absolutely go through with something like this
And I want whoever came up with this idea to spontaneously combust, but neither of us is going to get what we want.
Welp, looks like I just bought my last Logitech mouse. I’ve sworn by them for over 20 years.
Nope, fuck you Logitech.
same. every logitech peripheral i’ve ever had was great, and the one time an old mouse i’d been using for 2 years broke, i emailed them about it and they sent me a MX master 2S, which was several tiers above the one i had, for free.
oh well. time to find a new mouse brand
“This is a premium feature. To unlock the right-click menu, just enjoy this 30 second ad, or click to add to your monthly subscription.”
The answer to this is simple. Go private. Get a buyout and delist so you aren’t literally required to permanently and constantly grow your company bigger and sell more than you did last year for the rest of eternity in the name of the almighty shareholders.
Sell great hardware to people who need it, develop a loyal fan base, and treat them right, forever. I guarantee that the rate of valid, reasonable purchases of high-quality, durable new mice and keyboards is more than enough to sustain a very healthy company full of very talented employees forever, as long as they aren’t required to always make more money than ever before.
Logitech’s desire to put AI in my IO devices is exactly why I am moving to a different manufacturer. I want solid hardware, not hardware as a service. HP also is trying this with printers and it’s total bullshit.
If I am paying a monthly fee, I’d better not also have to buy garbage hardware. That better be provided for free and replaced when it inevitably fails.
Faber states that “[It] was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you’d constantly update, and it was beautiful.”
Since we’re pretty much all in agreement that Logitech has enshittified with the Great Ones like Ubisoft, Hewlett Packard, and more, let’s talk about our last great products they made that we will no longer recommend! 😃
These are all my products that I love, and have been extremely high quality. All of them work just fine to this day!
- Logitech G502 Proteus Spectrum mice (I own two, bought in 2018 I believe and still using)
- Logitech C920 1080p 30 FPS webcam
- Logitech G613 Lightspeed Wireless keyboard (great keyboard I use for work, hate that the keys are painted and will eventually wear away)
- Logitech G603 Wireless Mouse (for work, works fantastic!)
- Logitech Litra Beam LED lights (I own two)
Oh Logitech. Why can’t you just make products we can own instead of following the greedy “As a Service”? Ah well! Bound to happen one day (Steam, please please don’t ever become public).
I bought half a dozen G502’s when I found out they were changing them many years ago, and I’ve only opened 1 of them. Pretty sure I’m good for life at this point.
I like the M705 for my work PC. Wireless and the batteries literally last for years. They do eventually die to the ‘double click of death’ so no points for longevity of hardware.
Also have a G13 that I like. Never found a better gaming half-keyboard but they stopped making them a long time ago.
Dude, the G502 is such a great mouse. Mine has lived through so many years of gaming and is still chugging!
If you get ~7 years of life out of the M705, I would consider that to be quality since it would last through thousands of hours of usage. Any less and I would consider it a dud product, but that is certainly my opinion only there.
Never heard of the G13 before, so I looked it up and I think that’s pretty cool! This would have been a product I would have to try to see if it would fit my use case for gaming. A mini keyboard with a joystick seems cool, and admittedly I’m hovering my left hand in the air and trying to mimick what that would be like. Hard to conceptualize without actually trying it! I hope you got good use out of it, it does seem really cool.
If Logitech didn’t enshittify, they should’ve made their own version of the Power Glove. 😀 The Power Glove was way before my time on Earth, but man that would’ve been cool to see for PC.
I have never found anything as nice for my hand as the G502, and it has the perfect amount of buttons. That’s why I had to stock up!
The G13 got really popular AFTER Logitech discontinued it, because there really hasn’t been anything like it on the market. I went looking to stock up on those too, but I was too late - they will go for a couple hundred bucks or more, used, when you can find one!
Such a shame too because I always recommended the G502. I love the feel, the ergonomics, and the button placement. I love the customizeable weights you can swap in. I used to play with all the weights, but then over the years I took them all out and now use none. My aim got better in FPS games - I went from steaming hot garbage to just regular garbage LOL.
I’m going to watch a couple review videos of the G13 to see if it’s up my alley. And if yes, I’ll add that bad boy to my watch lists and pick up a used one if I can score it for a decent price.
They do eventually die to the ‘double click of death’ so no points for longevity of hardware.
Interesting… I’ve had one for 10 years, use it nearly daily, and haven’t had any issues.
I use their webcams and I’m not very impressed with the results. They haven’t updated the technology in a decade or more.
That’s a fair point. It’s interesting because this month I was considering upgrading my webcam to a 1080p 60fps one and certainly was going to consider them. I probably would have lightly researched a new Logi webcam and then bought it considering their track record and how wonderful my products have been.
I want to give companies my money in exchange for good products, but it’s weird! My morals won’t let me for some reason. It’s like I don’t agree with Logitech or something! Oh well! I’ll keep my money in my pocket and save it for a better product that doesn’t treat their customers like cattle.
It’s such a pain to find things. Would be nice to just have a list of products that work decently without subscriptions or printer ink economy bullshit.
When enough people are burned, that list will arise spontaneously. I’m sure there are some that are out there, but they probably are not well-known yet.
For example in the privacy community, Privacy Guides is one of the golden sources. I expect we’ll see something soon for products that avoid enshittification.
My previous logi mouse lasted for a decade before giving up.
My current MX mouse lasted almost 3 years before the rubber started separating from the case at the palm area.
I don’t know if I will buy another logi mouse.
I hear you dude. That 10+ year reputation is what drove me to buy their stuff, along with all the glowing user recommendations.
I heard that you can make the rubber last longer on mice by periodically cleaning them to slow their chance of breaking down, but I never experienced the rubber actually separating. That happened to my spouse’s Razer mouse (heh, that rhymes).
But I suppose that, apart from this whole post’s focus on “as a service”, that possibly Logi products have begun to go downhill quite recently. I wouldn’t know, all of mine have been great. Sucks for your MX mouse, but I feel you on the uncertainty of buying future Logi mice.
I don’t see the point of this. Why would a mouse need constant software updates? I could plug in a 20 year old mouse and it would work just fine on my PC, no updates needed.
There is no point… This corporate parasites justifying their new scam.
But like. AI. Ya know? Predictive mouse algorithm to make you clicky more gooder
I use a computer a lot, and I have an expensive keyboard and mouse. I’m the target market in a sense; if there was a compelling enough upgrade to either, I’d probably buy it.
I can’t imagine what software features they could possibly offer that would qualify, doubly so as a subscription. I picked my mouse because it has lots of buttons, a responsive sensor, low-latency wireless, and it runs on a standardized replaceable battery. It would be hard to improve any of that with software.
Not everything has to be a subscription.
Unless you’re a greedy CEO. Then everything should be a subscription!
