An essay in which I expound upon the benefits of the lowly wire and resist the temptation to wireless-ize the world of personal gadetry.
This weekend, in a futile effort to preserve my back and wrists, I’ve retooled my home office by including picking up a new mouse and keyboard. The only thing available at the local store was wireless, either bluetooth or using a proprietary dongle. While reasonably nice to use from an ergonomic standpoint they immediately began having interference with my network, including dropping or repeating keystrokes and mouse clicks. After 2 days of frustration I returned them. Then, after searching 3 stores to find a decent wired keyboard, I gave up in frustration. Wireless all.
The Good
Wireless sounds like a good idea. The promise of “No wires!” means no tangles, no restriction of movement, and no ugly cords all over your desk. This is especially attractive when you use a laptop 100% as I do. The last thing I want on an airplane is a wire to get tangled up in the seat. The wireless devices all look quite sleek and futuristic. And the accuracy of modern laser trackers on virtually all surfaces is quite simply astounding. Wireless promises a trouble free computing experience.
The Bad
For all of the good, there’s actually a lot of problems with wireless devices.
First: all wireless gadgets must have batteries, which means one more thing to monitor, charge, and replace. Next, the minute you have an active network over the air you have to worry about eavesdropping. That means security layers, network protocols, and the bane of bluetooth: pairing. The act of connecting two devices which are a scant 2 feet from each other simply isn’t worth the pain. I returned three bluetooth headsets over the years due to pairing issues.
Once you get your device set up and authenticated you still must worry about interference. I found that my keyboard would drop key presses if I was doing my hourly backup over the network at the same time. Not doing two things at once is the opposite of progress. And finally, to add insult to injury, wireless devices cost more.
Now let’s consider the alternative.
Wires
Wires are simple to use. You attach a wired mouse to your computer by plugging it in. Through the magic of USB, the device is immediately detected and the driver installed. Plus you get power for free, so no more batteries to replace. Nothing goes over the air you don’t have to worry about eavesdropping, so no security system and no pairing. No RF transmission means no interference with the 4.8 billion other wireless devices in my house.
In addition to the security aspects wires are usually faster and cheaper. USB 2.0 is far faster than even the latest Wifi N standards, which I suspect is why Apple doesn’t sync the iPhone over wifi. And the cost of course is fantastic. No extra batteries and radio transmitters makes any gadget cheaper to produce.
The costs of wireless (financial, technical, and mental) are worth the benefits in some situations. But for lots of things: just go with a wire. It works.
I’m with you – I gave up wireless mice a couple of years ago. Too frustrating and imprecise. They’re great in a boardroom though for passing control of a presentation around a table.
Wires can also be used as a tourniquet to give you time to get to the hospital following an unexpected amputation of a limb. Let me see you do that with a wireless mouse!
Right. Due to Murphy’s law, batteries are always low on energy at an unfitting moment (ever played a 1st person shooter when your batteries have ‘low ammo’?). And after each battery replace, you of course need a resync.
I fully agree with you. Fortunately, I can still find mouse and keyboard with wire at my local stores (in France), although they clearly are in minority now. Note that you have wired laser mouses too…
I find the need to power these devices by batteries unfortunate, for money (they are costly in the long term), for practical usage (need to replace these batteries and none at hand a Sunday evening…) and even for the current ecological trend…
Wires are simple, fast and reliable. Just a bit too short, sometime…
Hey, even at home where I have a small network in the same room, I used Ethernet cables in preference to WiFi.
Hi, Interesting post.
Just a small spelling error:
It‘s quite in here! Why not leave a response?
should be “quiet” not “quite”
as for the eavesdropping:
wired keyboards just feel safer, they aren’t really…
http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/20/keyboard-eavesdropping-just-got-way-easier-thanks-to-electrom/
other than that i agree – wires aren’t all that bad
I absolute agree. Wireless can be annoying at times. I’m glad I live in a third world country (Ghana) in this case, since getting a Wired USB 2.0 mouse is the easiest thing to do when it comes to shopping for IT gadgets. Now, getting a cheap Dual Core Laptop with about 3.0Ghz processor, 300GB of hard disk space and 3GB of RAM is an almost impossible task. Yet still, that is why I love my country.
Nice to know you have new blog, hope your design related rants will include Swing,related examples, cos I do think that library is dead yet (although dying – very very sad face).
D’oh! Thanks for catching the quite/quiet error.
I love my wires; I have collegues who work with a shield between their workplaces, to stop them from moving each other’s pointer,
Since a lot of the office stuff is wireless, I recently started to use gaming hardware for my daily work. Good gaming hardware use wires, exactly because batteries and wireless is so unrelyable. But I’m not using the overstyled stuff with lights, but “hardcore” material; for example the steelseries keyboard and mouse.