The first time I plugged in the new Magic Mouse I did it instinctively, the way you'd plug in any modern peripheral. The cable went into a port. The port was on the underside of the mouse. The mouse was, again, lying on its back like a dead beetle on my desk while it charged. Nine years after the original Magic Mouse 2, in a refresh whose entire reason for existing was the connector, Apple kept the connector in the place that has been the punchline of every review since 2015.
That is the whole story of the 2024 Magic Mouse in one moment. Everything else is the same mouse. Same low-slung aluminum-and-glass shell. Same flat top that gives your palm nowhere to rest. Same single multi-touch surface that, for all the complaining I am about to do, is the best part of using a Mac with one hand on the desk.
The gestures are why I still have one. Two-finger swipe between Spaces, momentum scrolling that actually decelerates the way a trackpad does, the way Safari swipes through history when you flick sideways. No other mouse on the market does this on macOS, and once you've spent a few months with it you notice the absence on any other pointer. For ten-minute bursts of email, browsing, and window-flicking, the Magic Mouse is genuinely lovely. The surface itself is glass and tracks your finger as accurately as the trackpad on a current MacBook, which is the kind of small thing that took Apple a decade to get right on a desktop pointer.
The ergonomics are why I have an MX Master 3S next to it. Anything past about half an hour and my hand starts to claw, because there is nothing to grip and nothing to lean on. My wrist sits flat on the desk and my fingers do all the work. I once tried to do a long writing session with the Magic Mouse as my only pointer and gave up by lunch. The body is so low that you cannot rest the heel of your palm anywhere comfortable; you end up pinching the mouse with your fingertips, which is fine for two minutes and a problem at hour three.
The charging port is the one I keep coming back to. There is no version of the design conversation in which moving it to the front edge was harder than leaving it on the bottom. The fact that they shipped a USB-C refresh and didn't fix it tells you exactly how much priority the Magic Mouse gets inside Apple now. It is a finished design, in the sense that nobody is finishing it. The black version, by the way, is $30 more for the same mouse in a darker color. I have one because I am the person Apple is selling to. I am also slightly embarrassed about it.
The click feel is fine. Tracking is fine. Battery is about a month at moderate use. None of these are the reasons you would or wouldn't buy this mouse. The reasons are the gestures (good) and the shape (bad), and they have been the reasons since 2015.
Verdict: Buy this as a second mouse on a Mac, for gesture-driven browsing and Mission Control flicks, and pair it with something you can actually grip for the rest of the day.