The cable was not a problem

A wireless mouse on a desk is the clearest example I can think of of paying a real cost to solve a problem nobody had.

Consider what the cable was doing. Lying on a desk, a metre and a half of it, motionless, delivering power and data with complete reliability for the entire life of the device. It has never gone flat, never needed pairing, never dropped a click, and never required a driver. As problems go, it was not one.

Removing it costs you a battery that dies, usually mid-task and never at a convenient moment. It costs a small delay between moving your hand and the pointer moving, which is imperceptible until you play something that requires precision and then is the only thing you notice. It costs a receiver occupying a port on a laptop that has three. And it costs an occasional morning where the thing has decided it is no longer paired and nobody can say why.

In exchange, the desk looks tidier.

I want to be fair about where this genuinely wins, because it does. A laptop used from a sofa with a mouse on the arm of a chair. A machine connected to a television, operated from across a room. A presentation where you need to stand somewhere other than beside the computer. In all of those the cable is a real constraint and removing it is worth every one of the costs above.

None of those is a desk, and the desk is where most of these are sold.

There is a smaller point worth noting about how they connect. The proper standard exists and works, and a great many manufacturers ship a proprietary receiver instead, because their own radio protocol has lower latency and pairs more reliably. So the open standard loses on quality to a dongle you cannot replace, and if you lose it the peripheral is finished.

That is a familiar shape. The standard is the correct answer and the proprietary version is better today, and every buyer resolves that individually, at the till, in favour of the thing that works now.