Trying very hard to hold back a torrent of rants about the state of tech. I’m clinging onto an older model of something at a time when they don’t make a good new alternative, you can figure out where the problem is.
So far I’ve changed the switches (the mechanical things inside the mouse that click), the outer shell, the scroll wheel, and the teflon pads at the bottom.
Am quite pleased with how it doesn’t feel like it’s falling apart anymore.
It’s sad that the switches and rubber shell especially feel like they were intentionally built to age very poorly. This was not a cheap mouse, and switches that don’t break in two years are like 2$ more than the ones they used. The rubber coating on the outside peeled and crumbled until I finally replaced the whole outer shell with a solid single piece. And the scroll wheel was beginning to rust.
Overall some of the replacement parts don’t feel quite as rigid. The older rubber part, while crumbling from the outside in, was glued to a sturdier-feeling plastic frame than the replacement, which is just a little creaky.
But hey. I love fixing my stuff and using what I want, marketers and their poor record of product discontinuation be damned. I probably wouldn’t have bought a new one. But I don’t like that I can’t if I needed to. I don’t like that everything is built to be disposable when things as simple as a scroll wheel that doesn’t rust, a shell not made of crumbly rubber, or switches that don’t break after two years have all been the default for 40 years before the current tech dark age.
I won’t buy Razer stuff again. I bought into the hype and got a full setup several years ago - mouse, keyboard, headset… Not a single one of them lasted even a year - mouse (original naga) stopped right clicking within 6 months, the mic on the headset stopped working after 32 days, the space bar on the keyboard died around 9 months, and finally the left side speaker on the headphones died just before the 12 month mark. The logitech stuff mice aren’t great, but in the past I’ve gotten more like 4-ish years out of them, and the software support has been better imo.
Thank you for all the details though - I will definitely look into this. I’ve already got a couple of old g600’s lying around that were retired for one reason or another that I could practice on.
Logitech has consistently gotten worse over time, so I’d be wary of their new stuff. Best of luck with the G600 collection. Logitech’s own software isn’t what it used to be. Mouse QMK can’t come fast enough.
I avoided Razer like the plague and was really turned off by their marketing up until I tried this last mouse, after getting recommendations and being told a few times that they’re not the same cringey gAmErZrIsEuP brand they used to be. My understanding is that they got their shit together and are not the same gimmick salesmen that they were when they exploded in popularity. The software wasn’t too bad IIRC, but I remember being frustrated when all I wanted was the G604’s simple premise: six side buttons (I just need four), two extra top buttons (I just need one), physically unlocking scroll wheel, and quick switching between computers (one button to switch from Bluetooth to wireless dongle and back). The big dealbreaker wasn’t the repeated recharge cycle or the need to double mouse it, it was the damn electro-magnetic scroll wheel. If you scroll too much in one direction, its clicks lose resistance. I’m someone who probably scrolls longer distances than I walk some days. The scroll tactility slowly becoming sludgy made me go back to my old mouse within a month.
Edit: I’ve just pulled it out of the drawer to see. Have wrapped my observations in a spoiler tag to keep things readable.
spoiler
It’s a Razer Naga V2 Pro, which was not cheap, especially here where I live, but again, I use my mouse more than my car.
The scroll is not quite as bad as I’m describing here. The Razer Central application does hound you for an account, but the Razer Synapse software is what controls your mouse, and you can use that without an account. These programs don’t launch on my system startup and this is the first time they’ve been opened in over a year.
The mouse shape and ergo feels great. The problem is more that the software doesn’t quite fire the same commands to the OS as the Logitech software does. I don’t have Forward and Back, I have my attempted workarounds of Alt+left and Alt+right. It doesn’t have a single crisp click for left and right scrolling like the Logitech software does, where it keeps repeating at a specific rate. Instead I have two options: Scroll Left and Scroll Right, or Keep Scrolling Left and Keep Scrolling Right (these are the default ones). The defaults fire way too quickly - so instead of going column by column in a spreadsheet, it is hard to get it to land where you want it. The other set go column by column, which is good, but if you hold them down nothing happens. Worse, the software warns you that you need to have Synapse open for these single column ones to work. Compare that to my Logitech which I’ve had the horizontal scroll work in Windows, Linux, and Mac. It’s like they gave me two options to choose from which are both worse than what I had. The timing of that one is just right, it speeds up the more you hold it down, so you could skip a precise number of columns or just zoom across when you need to, instead of choosing just one scenario.
Theoretically, this could all be fixed in software. In practice, I don’t expect that from Razer. But it is really one stubborn product manager’s week away from being close to perfect, even out of the box. Optical switches too, so theoretically unlimited lifespan.
The scroll is not as bad as I remember, but the physically locking and unlocking mechanism that Logitech uses is way way more intuitive. For this, I had to set a custom scrolling pattern to feel like proper scroll clicks the way I like them, and the smooth mode doesn’t have the momentum that a heavy, free-spinning scroll wheel does. The tech is very cool! It’s customizeable, you can simulate different scroll types and it’s genuinely very interesting to play with. But a metal bar that locks and unlocks into plastic detents is just so much better, especially given you can’t scroll indefinitely in one direction without the simulated scroll bumps becoming sludgy.
The replaceable panels are cool, but I got this explicitly for the six button panel. And yet I ended up using the 12 button one more. Why? Well the buttons feel crisp on the 6 button panel, but they are just soft enough that you can mash them when you pick the mouse up. So the 12 button one, which is firmer, is what I switched to, even though I’ve only programmed 5 of those buttons. Sadly, the 12 buttons themselves are not beautifully made: to keep things RGB-capable, they are using button caps that are made with white plastic with a thin black outer layer, into which the legends are lasered. Only problem is that your hand rests on them and they start to peel. The 6 legend is just a white blob where the number 6 used to be. But I have to admit, the shell otherwise feels excellent. Switching back and forth between it and my fixed G604, I find that I like the ring finger rest on the Razer and that would be a nice addition to the G604. Looks like that’s precisely the shape of the G600. I wouldn’t mind that plus the thumb pad rest thing of the G604 on the opposite side, but now I’m just being extremely nitpicky.
This one might just work for you, if you can stomach the frankly ridiculous price. Upon a quick search, it looks like the cheaper non-Pro might have been better for me, if I knew I wouldn’t like their six-button panel: AA battery like the G604, extra top left buttons like the G604, mechanical switches and scroll wheel… But to swap between dongle and Bluetooth it’s still a toggle switch on the bottom instead of a button on top, which is so good on the G604.
Hope this helps you. Or someone out there.