It seems a little silly to say, but the Apple Magic Mouse may just be my favorite piece of technology in the past couple years.

At the office, we've been plagued by mice that skip, stop scrolling, and collect large amounts of dirt. To say that the previous Mighty Mouse from Apple may just be my most hated piece of tech in recent memory wouldn't be far off. Just this week there was an Oprah-esque moment at the office and we all got new mice. (Thanks Blake!)

The old mouse seemed great on paper—clean lines, a scroll ball that allowed 360-degree movement, an extra button at your thumb. These features proved to be its biggest points of failure in the long-term: the scroll ball would always eventually get stuck, sometimes permanently; the two-piece design formed a large space around the bottom that collected gunk; the thumb button was too sensitive and lead to inadvertent clicks because of its placement.

It's great to see when a company makes a mistake and fixes it the next time around. The Magic Mouse doesn't have any of the problems above. There's no moving parts, just a clean surface. Multi-touch is a nice tie-in with the new track-pads on notebooks and gives a lot of extra movement without adding complexity. It connects wirelessly via Bluetooth so there's nothing extra to plug-in and take up USB slots. The bottom area is now raised on two ski-like slats that don't collect dirt and are easy to clean. The improved reliability of a mouse may seem slight, but it really is the main interface between us and the computer. A mouse that works better increases productivity.

There's a sense of comfort in its simplicity. The packaging is barely bigger than the body. Instead of trying to wow the user with tons of buttons and features, its almost as if the Magic Mouse is making a statement that, "this will do." It's enough instead of more.

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