Apple Magic Mouse 5

Leave it to Apple to fundamentally improve the pointing device that they introduced to the mass market back in 1984. The addition of multi-touch technology -- pointing and dragging with your fingers -- to the top surface of the mouse -- where your fingers are -- has dramatically changed and improved the popular rodent.

This is a slick little mouse. I've been using it for about a day and I tend to be pretty demanding of my pointing devices. Prior to this mouse I've found wireless mice to not perform as well as ones with a wire, but this one has tracking that is smooth and not jittery at all. I'd be happy to level a character in World of Warcraft to 80 using only this mouse.

Physically the mouse is a beautiful object. It's curvy, slim, and anthropomorphic. It has zero buttons -- the whole top of the mouse clicks down. The bottom is aluminum and it's very light to pick it up. On the bottom are two teflon-like black strips that it glides around on. It uses an infrared laser so you can't see any light coming out of the mouse hole on the bottom.

I really like the multi-touch top surface. Scrolling with it by just dragging a finger over the top is really cool. There's no feedback like with a wheel or the "nub" on the Mighty Mouse but it doesn't really need feedback because you're actually moving your finger and not a mechanical switch. Being able to zoom and also swipe left and right from the mouse is also a very cool thing. It's well integrated, in that it doesn't feel like they just strapped a touchpad to the top of the mouse.

The only downside is that you can't middle-click any more. On the Mighty Mouse, you could push the nub in to make a middle click, which usually worked although it didn't always read correctly. That action was handy for opening links in a new browser tab. After a few days I'll know if this missing action really bothers me or not.