I was thinking about magic so here are my ramblng thoughts about it. The way I see it there are three types:

1 Magic that's actually advanced technology.

Of course any technology can look like magic if it's advanced enough but there are plenty of examples in fictoion and in reality of people trying to pass off their technology as something mystical. This edges into the scond type too because a lot of the time the book or show assumes a technology that might not be possible like warp drive or force fields.

There are examples of this in Star Trek, Stargate, and Babylon 5.

2 Magic that uses unknown or fictional forces

Where the natural world and technology work the way they normally do but there's also some kind of force or energy field that can be manipulated to produce magical effects. I think MLP would fall roughly into this category. This is also what people who believe magic is real would claim.

There are a lot of examples of this but I think the best one is Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere universe. He takes great pains to ensure that physics works normally there but there's a force called investiture that can influence things and change them the same way a magnetic field can negate gravity.

3 Magic that's contradictory to the natural laws we know

Where magic isn't just something science doesn't understand but something that it can't understand.  Something that's completely outside of the laws of physics as we know them but still capable of interacting with our world.

Examples of this are The Dresden Files and Harry Potter.

A lot of things don't bother to define which of these they are but I'm a nerd so I think about things like this a lot.