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.
I’ve already got a Forever Mouse though… I’m using a $25 Logitech M705 I bought 10 years ago, before they cheaped out and replaced the metal scrollwheel with a plastic one. Works great. I have to replace the battery once every two years or so. I’ve got an 11-year-old Logitech mouse at work too.
My g9x is getting flakey, and I’m very sad.
My MX510 from 2005 died recently. I’m sure it’s just a cable issue since if I straighten it out perfectly, once in a while I can still get a signal through. So I’m contemplating of desoldering it and put a new one in, it was otherwise flawless.
MaaS?
given how much is going on in the diy / open source keyboard community, I’m sure there’s going to be some options
100%.
Even today, you can buy a component kit and 3D print your own custom shell for a DIY mouse. (the hardware quality is alright)
I can only imagine what the OSS community will do once companies like Logitech try rolling this crap out on a larger scale. It’s like the outrage against all things wrong with printers, except so much lower tech that almost anyone could build their own.
Reminds me of what happed to GE’s lighting division. They used to have a steady stream of income from people replacing burned out bulbs. The CFLs and LED bulbs came in.
GE made a ton of money selling the new bulbs to homes, businesses and cities, but then the money dried up because the new bulbs lasted way longer.
Then they started scrambling to do weird shit with lighting. Like cramming cameras and sensors into bulbs so lights could be used for surveillance in cities and stores. They were basically struggling to find a new reason why you’d want to by a new bulb.
The LED elements last a lifetime, but the driver transistors burn out as frequently as traditional bulbs
My entire house is LEDs. I was a pretty early adopter and I still have the OG Phillips bulbs floating around my house.
In 10 years I’ve only had one bulb crap out. With incandescent bulbs there were always several a year that needed to be swapped. Back in the day I used to have a box of extra bulbs in my closet. I no longer keep that box because it’s just taking up space for something that is almost never touched.
Most articles confirm my experience and show that LEDs have muuuuch longer lifespans.
“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.”
And I don’t want to buy it. Not everything needs to be a subscription.
Or an app.
Not everything needs to be a subscription.
More like “[almost] everything needs not to be a subscription!”
Yep. Products should never need subscriptions. Only services. Things like Photoshop even, absolutely shouldn’t be subscriptions.
And they wonder why we pirate.
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
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.
Bite my shiny metal PS/2 adapter
Businesses could save a lot of money by just firing their CEOs
If anyone’s job could be replaced with ChatGPT, it’s these chucklefucks.
And now I no longer wish to buy Logitech products…
I stopped when they added AI to their software
I no longer wished to use Logitech products after using G-Hub. Most horrible software.
More like the never mouse, you can keep the monthly sub peripherals.
If I mistake your shit ideas as an Onion article, you should be fired. Who would pay monthly on a mouse?
Logitech CEO can fuck right off.
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.
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.
did you ever watch the youtube ‘deepdive’ into the double click?
Turns out they are using an older switch which, while great at the time, wants a higher voltage than modern, electricity diet, mice.
I have not but I’ll check it out later. Thanks!
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.
I have a Logitech G710+. After years (like 8) of use, the keycaps were starting to crack with age. I reached out to Logitech and they sent me all new keycaps, free of charge, despite being several times past the warranty period.
Truly amazing customer service.
That’s quality right there. You probably would have bought those key caps, but they just sent them to you for free. That’s going above and beyond, and that’s how you keep a customer. Noctua is all about that, and I’ll continue to buy their products and recommend them.
Such a shame, Logitech. You were great but now you’re turning into crap.
yea, would have happily paid for keycaps, since i was so far past any kind of warrenty.
Ended up buying some nicer, PBT kecaps 4 years after that anyways. Still use this keyboard, even if part of the backlighting has failed in the… 12 years.
That’s a good looking keyboard right there mate.
Nice keycaps! Can you please provide link to them? Thinking of getting some fancy ones myself.
Same with me! I bought that keyboard because at the time it was the cheapest mechanical keyboard I could find that wasn’t an Aliexpress special, and it’s still working well for me.
The keycaps for that keyboard have a known design issue - the plastic part that connects it to the key is too thin and breaks easily - which is why I think they’re willing to send out free replacements.
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.
The aggressive enshittification of everything is why I’ve started downloading games from gog instead of steam.
Its why i have a jellyfin server.
Now its why ill have to find a new favorite mouse to use and have multiple backups of (once my g502 wireless and the backup finally die)
Hello fellow GOG fan! I own 620 games on GOG, and I license 214 games on Steam. Granted some of those Steam games do not have DRM, so consider that an estimate.
Man you sound almost exactly like me lol. A lot of angry persons who have been burned by companies are becoming like us. What sent me over the edge was when Ubisoft threatened to shutdown their legacy activation servers, which would have led to me losing the DLC I purchased for my physical Wii U copy of Splinter Cell Blacklist. They backpedaled after significant fan backlash, but now I’ve been radicalized. I avoid “as a service” to the best of my ability and am deliberately hostile to these corporations.
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.
