Mouse technology has come a long way since the rollerball mice of the 1980s. Logitech’s Performance Mouse MX drives that point home--it can be used on practically any surface, and it offers features that our first Mac mouse could never have dreamed of.

Despite its deep feature set, the sleek Performance Mouse MX is a simple install. It uses a tiny Unifying USB receiver, which works with other wireless Logitech products simultaneously--handy if you’ve got several wireless peripherals but only have one spare USB port. The battery life is impressive--we used the mouse for over a month without charging it. When you do need to re-up, the MX comes with a micro-USB cable for recharging from either your Mac or a wall outlet, and its nifty LEDs display the charge level.

Sure it's a hundred bucks... but it'll track on glass, man!

The tracking on the MX is almost too good to be true--we even busted out some of our older Logitech mice to make sure we weren’t just imagining things. The mouse uses Logitech’s Darkfield Laser Tracking, which is a fancy sci-fi jargon way of saying its two lasers detect the most miniscule details on your surface and create a micro-road map. It can track on practically any surface--even clear glass. The precision of the MX makes us feel like we’re actually drawing on screen with a pen in hand.

The MX is equipped with a hyperfast scrollwheel that even allows for horizontal scrolling. One of our favorite features is a button that lets you switch between free-spinning (for wicked-fast scrolling) or ratcheted scrolling (for line-by-line control). We used the well-placed thumb buttons for everything from jumping between windows in Exposé to moving backward and forward through our browser history to zooming in and out of photos and web pages. Whether you use your Mac for coding or just everyday web surfing, tweakable controls like these are a boon to productivity.

Logitech’s Control Center software lets you customize button settings and also gives you an onscreen battery monitor that can track the power levels of multiple devices sharing the same Unifying receiver. It’s a neat trick, as is the MX mouse’s ability to charge while you work. It’s the small details that make the MX stand apart from cheaper alternatives. The downside (aside from its sky-high price)? Users with small hands like mine might not be totally comfortable using the beefy Performance MX mouse; coworkers with larger paws, however, weren’t bothered by its size or weight. And the mouse is right-hand only.