Inside the M-001: A Teardown with Tais & Lukas
The written companion to the M1 Teardown video. ▶ Watch the full teardown here.
We're back, and this time it's with our newest product. The M-001 is our first mouse, and we've been waiting for the moment we could take it apart on camera and talk it through. Tais and Lukas, our Head of Product and Design Engineer, get into the thinking behind it, the parts we nailed from the beginning and the ones that took a few iterations to get right.
The M1 in its case. Mouse in the middle, receiver to the side, accessories pack on the left, all seated in a thick layer of PU foam to keep things safe while on-the-go.
The mouse ships nested in PU foam thick enough that you can drop it in a bag and forget about it.
A Top Shell with No Holes
The M1's top shell is completely solid, no holes cut anywhere, so every point your hand meets is without discomfort. Grip it however you like and nothing changes under your fingers.
For a magnesium mouse, that's unusual. Almost everything else in the category punches holes in the shell to shed weight which affects the end user experience. And if raw lightness were the whole goal, magnesium would be the wrong material to begin with: an all-plastic shell with no battery mechanism can get down into the mid-30-gram range. What you give up is rigidity, the reassuring stiffness you only get from a metal body.
So we put the weight where it earns its keep and left the shape neutral on purpose, something that works across grip styles and suits a lot of different hands, and saved the indulgence for elsewhere.
The solid magnesium alloy top shell. No holes, one continuous texture.
Getting Inside
Peel the skates off and four screw wells appear underneath, two up front and two at the back. One small Phillips head bit opens all of them. From there the bottom shell lifts away from the top, held to it by nothing but a single ribbon cable running to the side button PCB. Flip the retention tab on the connector and it comes free. Every ribbon cable in the M1 releases the same way.
The Side Buttons
Side buttons are a quiet balancing act. Too flush and they'll feel mushy in-game; too sharp and they create a distracting feeling at your thumb. Ours rise gently from each side into a raised bump in the centre, tucked into a divot so your thumb finds them on its own.
Lift out the side button PCB and the buttons slide free of the shell. Look closely and they're two materials at once: a plastic hinge carrying a magnesium alloy face. Go full magnesium and the hinge turns stiff and dead, so we split the job, plastic where it needs to flex and metal where your thumb lands. Most magnesium mice skip this and just mould the side buttons in plastic. We wanted the metal to carry all the way through, bottom case to side buttons, so the whole thing feels like a single piece. The switches got the same attention, because a mushy side button next to a crisp main click is the kind of mismatch that is immediately noticeable.
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A Status Light Without Distraction
There's a small status LED on the side of the mouse that reports battery status and setting changes made over the dongle. Sitting on the side button PCB, it's wrapped in a foam shroud pressed tight against a polycarbonate light guide. That guide gets painted twice, white first, then black.
The black seals the light in, so none of it escapes where it shouldn't; the white underneath bounces it forward instead of letting the black soak it up. The light reaches the surface clean, with nothing spilling around the edges. All of this means the light is minimal, distraction-free so you can focus on your game.
The Clicks
Two screws and the main clicks come away from the top shell. They're magnesium alloy, same as the body, mounted through the centre of the top shell. The feel comes from a lever arm doing the hinge work, tuned to provide a precise and crisp click.
This is where the clicks and the side buttons go their separate ways. The side buttons needed a plastic hinge to feel right; the main clicks keep theirs in magnesium, due to the bigger size and length. It's a big reason they have such a satisfyingly crisp click.
The Battery, and The Port That isn't There
Take off the scroll wheel, unclip the battery ribbon cable, back out two screws, and the battery mechanism lifts away.
Turn it over and you can see a neat bit of reasoning. Hollowing out the underside for weight would normally leave the sides flexing, so rather than adding bracing we let existing parts pull double duty: the battery mechanism and the PCB themselves stiffen the chassis. Structure for free, from components that had to be there anyway, all without adding extra weight to keep things rigid.
The mechanism is a polycarbonate housing with a daughterboard on the back, sandwiched between it and the top shell once everything's together. Landing on this took a while. There were prototypes, there were people testing them, and there was a whole graveyard of rejected ideas: non-hot-swap designs, plastic snaps, press fits, magnets. The winner is a latch style mechanism which you may already know from SD cards. The battery drops in from the bottom and slides out at an angle toward the top, which happens to put it right where your thumb has the best access, gliding over the sensor. It's reliable, it's satisfying, and it never leaves you guessing.
That same mechanism let us do something people tend to miss on first look: the M1 has no USB port. With hot-swappable batteries there's nothing to plug in, so the USB-C port came out entirely, along with its weight. In testing, most people didn't even clock that it was gone.
The PCB
With the battery mechanism gone, only the bottom shell and PCB remain, and the board lifts straight out. It travels in two pieces: the PCB itself and a polycarbonate cover guarding it. We cut a window into that cover on purpose, so you can see what's running the mouse without pulling it apart.
Doing the clicking are Omron optical switches, the D2FP-FN2, rated to 70 million cycles, and against the magnesium click structure they feel properly crisp. The scroll wheel turns on a gold, dustproof TTC encoder, a favourite among mouse enthusiasts, which is designed with a shroud keeping dust out so it stays consistent over time. Underneath sits the lens for the PixArt 3950 sensor and the on/off switch.
Every Part, a Conscious Decision
A shell with no holes, a battery that holds the mouse together, a mouse you never plug in. Every one of these started as a question, and plenty of them ended up somewhere we didn't plan: a hinge that's half plastic and half metal, a light guide painted white so the black wouldn't waste it, a battery latch lifted from an SD card.
