After I upgraded my MacBook Pro to the latest MacOS 26 I stopped getting notices when the battery in my bluetooth Magic Mouse was low and needed recharging. Is there a setting to reenable that? I asked ChatGPT and got this response.
There isn’t a user-accessible toggle in System Settings in macOS 26 to turn the Bluetooth low-battery notification on or off. Apple appears to have removed or changed this behavior in recent macOS versions. Apple Support Community
Apple’s official settings do not include battery notifications for Bluetooth peripherals as a separate notification category you can enable/disable in System Settings → Notifications. There’s simply no switch there.
It suggested maybe using a 3rd-party app for that. Any suggestions here?
Poor substitute for a notification, but have you looked at the Batteries desktop widget? (Referring to the standard Apple one, in case there are third-party equivalents.)
If we’re talking passive checks (i.e., you need to access something to see the status), you can install the Bluetooth menu bar icon and tap it to see the battery status of all recently connected devices. If you don’t have it installed in the menu bar, you can tap the karat in the Bluetooth Control Center button for the same information.
If you have installed iStat Menus, you can use it for an easier-to-read version of battery use for active devices.
I do have that installed in the menu bar. But now I have to remember to periodically check it. Before MacOS 26 I got popup notifications if the Magic Mouse battery was getting low.
I’m not familiar with iStat Menu. I’ll check it out. Or just set a reminder to check the battery status every week or so.
It is possible that macos does not recognise that the mouse battery is low because, apparently, the default setting is 2% which is very low. You might be able to change this to a higher value using Terminal commands. See these (old) tips:
I’m pretty sure I was getting notifications in the past at higher battery levels, like around 20%. This last time the battery was completely drained and I didn’t notice until it stopped worked and I plugged it in again.
It’s been ages since I used a mouse, but I have Magic Trackpad I occasionally use on one Mac and I found the “low battery” alerts so always be so late as to be useless.
But it wasn’t a problem because I could plug it in for charging for literally one minute and it would give me like 15 minutes of use, so even if died while I was using it, it wasn’t too inconvenient.
That’s interesting. I’m on Sequoia/M4 Mini and have gotten 2% notifications as well, and I remember thinking “gee thanks for the warning”. I am sure I was getting them around 10% before, which meant I could go through the day and plug in at night. At 2% I have to stop and plug in right away. I now try to plug in on Friday when I shut down.
If you right-click on the desktop, you’ll get a context menu that offers a choice to Edit Widgets… . Much to explore. You should find Batteries close to the top of the list in the left-hand column.
Google “wireless charging mouse pad”, there are a number of choices. I use a wired mouse and no mouse pad, so can’t comment on how they work, but they certainly exist.
I kid you not: half a dozen times in the past year I have “invented” something, gone to Amazon and searched, and found dozens of such items already for sale!
(One example: my mom got put on oxygen last spring and was struggling with the oxygen hose lines that hook over her ears messing up her hearing aids. I thought there must be some little clip that could connect the line to her glasses to keep them off her ears. Sure enough, tons of such items on Amazon! I bought her a set, but the weight and pull of the tubing made her glasses droop and hurt her nose, so they didn’t really help. But it was a good idea. Better would have been the ones that hook to the brim of a hat, except she never wears a hat. )
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