The Case for Wired Peripherals
A few months ago a friend saw my desk and asked, with genuine confusion, why I had so many cables. The answer is that everything plugged into my computer is wired. Keyboard, mouse, headphones. The monitor too, obviously, but nobody questions that one yet. I suspect that day is coming.
I didn't set out to make a statement. I don't have strong ideological feelings about USB versus Bluetooth. What happened is more mundane: I tried wireless peripherals at various points over the years, each time encountered some irritation that wired equivalents don't have, and each time quietly went back to cables. After enough repetitions of this cycle, I stopped trying.
The keyboard was the first thing I tried going wireless with, maybe eight or nine years ago. It was a reasonable keyboard. Felt fine to type on. But I'd sit down to work and discover the batteries had died overnight, or sometime over the weekend while I wasn't paying attention. Not a catastrophe — I kept spare batteries in the drawer — but an interruption. A small friction at the exact moment I wanted to start working. With a wired keyboard, I sit down and type. There is no step between intention and action. That directness is worth more to me than a clean desk.
The mouse situation was similar but worse. Wireless mice, in my experience, have a talent for dying at inconvenient moments. Usually in the middle of something that requires precision — selecting a range in a spreadsheet, cropping an image, trying to hit a small UI element. The cursor stutters, or freezes, or starts drifting. Sometimes the fix is to jiggle the battery compartment. Sometimes the receiver has come loose from the USB port. Sometimes I just need to replace the batteries again. Each individual incident is trivial. Cumulatively, they represent a kind of low-grade unreliability that I find more annoying than a cable running across my desk.
Headphones are the one where people push back the hardest. "But the freedom of movement," they say. I understand the appeal. I do. If I were someone who paced while on calls or listened to music while cooking, wireless headphones would make sense. But most of my headphone use is at my desk, where I'm seated and not going anywhere. In that context, the wire is a non-issue. What is an issue, or would be, is another device that needs charging. I have enough things in my life that need charging. My phone. My laptop when I'm not at my desk. A flashlight. The idea of adding headphones to the charging rotation fills me with a tiredness I can't fully justify.
There's a latency question too, though I want to be careful not to overstate it. Modern Bluetooth is pretty good. For listening to podcasts or having a conversation, you'd never notice a delay. But I occasionally do audio work — nothing professional, just editing recordings for a project here and there — and in that context, even a small latency is perceptible and distracting. A wired connection is instant. There's nothing to configure, no codec to negotiate, no pairing mode to enter. You plug it in and sound comes out.
My current setup, for anyone curious, is not fancy. The keyboard is a Leopold FC900R that I bought in 2019 and see no reason to replace. The mouse is a Logitech something-or-other — I'd have to flip it over to check the model number and I'm not going to do that right now. The headphones are Audio-Technica ATH-M50x, which are the headphones that everyone recommends and, in this case, everyone is right. All of it is plugged in via USB or a 3.5mm jack. The cables are managed with a few adhesive clips I stuck to the underside of the desk. It's not beautiful, but it's tidy enough.
I think what I'm really describing is a preference for deterministic behavior. When I press a key, I want a letter to appear. When I move the mouse, I want the cursor to move. When I plug in headphones, I want to hear sound. I don't want to troubleshoot. I don't want to check battery levels. I don't want to re-pair a device because it decided to connect to my phone instead of my computer. I want the thing to work, the same way, every time. Wires give me that.
The trade-off is real. My desk has cables on it. I can't lean back and listen to music from across the room. If I want to use my headphones and my phone at the same time, I need a dongle or a second pair of headphones. These are genuine inconveniences that wireless would solve. I've simply decided that the inconveniences of wireless — charging, pairing, occasional flakiness — bother me more.
None of this is advice. If wireless peripherals work well for you, there's no reason to change. I'm just reporting, in the interest of full honesty, that my desk looks like 2009 and I'm at peace with it.
— Kevin V.