Design engineer Kevin Forde’s baby in the G900 project was a new metal pivot hinge for the left- and right-click. “In a typical plastic hinge design, you're deforming or bending plastic to press a switch,” Forde explained.
If you disassemble most mice, you’ll notice the left-and right-click buttons aren’t separate components, but simply part of the top shell of the mouse. With that design, you can see significant variation force it takes to press a switch between units that roll off the assembly line—as much as 10%, according to Forde’s testing. Even if both buttons on your mouse use the exact same switch, there’s a good chance they require different amounts of force to trigger. It can also take varying amounts of force to register a click depending on where you press. “We’ve removed that inconsistency completely,” Forde said.
“We’ve actually made the key a lot stiffer, so this reduces the deformation and bending of the plastic,” Forde said. “We have a metal pivot bar and this finely tuned pre-travel spring. It’s tuned to provide the right amount of force for the key to press against the strip so you don’t have too much pre-load. If you have too much, that’s bad, because you can get accidental clicks.”
The resulting button design gives the G900 a pair of praying mantis claws arcing forward, with a cavernous gap between the mouse’s palm hump and the button hinges. That gap looks like it would pinch the hell out of your hand, but you never touch that space, and leaving it empty saves precious grams.