Shagging Mice with Butter
Don't ask
Over the years I have used a number of Apple Peripherals.
Back in the beige days I really liked the ‘small’ Apple keyboards. While they didn't have the perfect feel of the Apple Extended II keyboard their nicely small size and their lack of nonsense keys like F1-F299 and so on more than made up for it.
With my LC III I also got the Apple Desktop Mouse II. Which is one of the best mice I ever used. There seem to be two different variants of that, one with a light ball and one with a heavy ball. The one with the light ball is the one to get as it is a real pleasure to use. That said, the plastic of the mouse could have been a bit better as it started wearing off and becoming shiny after a few years (years not months as with current Apple products).
Once I got my PowerBook without an ADB port I just wanted to get an extra keyboard and mouse for use at my desk. I got the transparent Apple Pro mouse which is one of the best looking mice ever. Its smart use of transparency not only looks great but also spares you from actually having to see what's inside. While the mouse is wired, it is much better to use than its later wireless siblings because it is lighter. I am not entirely convinced by the optical mouse concept – or Apple's implementation of it – though. It just doesn't work well on certain surfaces and my (wooden) desk is one of them, meaning that I always need some paper or so beneath the mouse.
I also got myself a second hand early iMac keyboard. With its small size, I hoped to to relive the blisses of the early beige keyboard I used. That almost worked size-wise. However after a few years the keys started feeling sticky and typing stopped being pleasant. At which state I got a spare Apple ‘Pro Keyboard’ which isn't that much of a joy to use either but isn't quite as bad yet. Oh and it's quite huge…
One thing that strikes me as stupid is the use of transparent plastic in Apple's input devices. Yes, it may make things look all shiny and bling when you buy them. But after months or even years they invariably accumulate all sorts of dirt that may happen to be around. And which you can see but not really remove once they made their way into the case.