@ Liudvikas:

I think the cheeper you go, the more robust they get. The standard wired mouse you get for free with a new Dell desktop can last years of abuse. Usually they die due to frayed cords rather than due to structural damage. I mean, it’s a chunk of plastic, with a tiny circuit board and laser lens embedded inside. It’s actually difficult to break it.

@ Naum:

Yeah, the scrolling is a delicate process on this mouse. It works very much like the touchpad which does take a bit of getting used to. Granted, the touchpad on the MBP is the best touchpad I have used in my life – the PC experience does not even come close. Magic Mouse is a combination of a great touchpad and crappy mouse which results in an average/decent experience. :) I still prefer the sidewinder for precision work.

The Ctrl+Scroll motion still works in Lion. I think the tap is there to let you auto-zoom images and such. Haven’t really used it much.

I especially like these:

– Single finger swipe left/right: browser back/forward
– Two finger swipe left/right: switch workspaces
– Two finger double tap – equivalent of three finger upward swipe – shows all the workspaces

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Actually, pretty much every cordless mouse I have ever owned was battery operated so this is not such a huge issue. I sort of got in a habit of switching off my mice when I leave the desk for an extended period of time.

But yeah, I can relate to these complaints. For me the ability to use gestures and the Bluetooth support does make up for some of that inconvenience.

@ Victoria:

Ugh, those black lines – yeah, they are kinda weird, and the sound they make is a bit off-putting. I might need to get a mouse pad or something.

It was a present for my birthday. It’s pretty and shiny and photogenic, but I hate it :) especially the bottom lines that make a faint but nasty scratching noise against the table.

My usual mouse is Wacom Intuos 3 native mouse, which has a nice curvy ‘butt’ that fits my hand perfectly.

I did like the magic trackpad though.

i really had to “work” with one of these over the last years, since it came with my work-imac.
To cut it short: i hated every second of it and just loved when i accomplished the heroic feat to convince my boss of buying me a cheap 25€ gaming-mouse.
Not even is this one cable-bound (and thus doesn’t run out of batteries every month, what leads to unbearable recharging/exchanging trouble if >10 persons use such crap) it even has the astonishing amount of 5 buttons and doesn’t scroll accidently because i just touched the mouse again. Even better: it _has_ haptic feedback and is somewhat ergonomic.

I don’t understand how apple accomplished to really get everything wrong what is to producing mice. We have cable-less mice around for some years now, giving it a cradle or even better some micro/mini-usb-port, so allowing it to recharge or even beeing used while charging is no magic anymore.

Before magic mouse, loathed all Apple incantations of the mouse.

Magic mouse is the most fantastic mouse ever IMV. Initially, I installed BetterTouchTool to add additional gestures, but have found that the default (plus enabling right click) OS X setup is dandy enough.

Why?

Two big reasons — scroll with inertia (when PC users bash the Mac mouse, they simply do not understand the “scroll with inertia” — it literally becomes an extension of your finger and is so natural and intuitive — only apt comparison would be the scroll motion on a touch device interface, like iPhone or iPad or Android device. The other may only be relevant if you do media (image, audio, video, etc.…) manipulation but is also handy when browsing — slide left (in browser, go back) and slide right (in browser, go forward).

Also, not using Lion yet, so my mouse setup looks a little different but to “screen zoom”, I just depress Ctrl button and “scroll” up or down to zoom in / zoom out.

I couldn’t go back to a regular mouse — I would feel crippled…

So what would you suggest for a “real mans mouse”, that could withstand nuclear holocaust or even worse – me dropping it again and again.
Because as of now all my mouses break because of my clumsiness, same goes for all the other peripherals.