Magic Trackpad 2 unresponsive on outer right side

[cg_user01]

I have gone through 3 magic trackpads (from amazon) by now (ordered and returned) and tested at 2 resellers and i have gotten very frustrated, since all of them have the same problem and I have found no one describing similar issues:



When I do a swiping motion from the outer right side (like really from the edge) to the left, the initial reaction of the curser is noticeably delayed.

The problem gets worse if you do multiple short fast swipes behind each other from the outer right to the left. Its kinda hard to explain for me ...:

Imagine just using the outer 3-4cm of the right hand side of the trackpad and doing short fast swipes from right to left. In this case the trackpad doesn't even react at all. This happens on the whole outer right hand side (so not just in the middle or at the top, it seems like a stripe of 3-4 cm width on the outer right hand side is reacting delayed or not at all) Slow movements are just a little delayed but fast short ones are not registered at all.

The thing is, the same motions/actions work perfectly(!) fine on the left hand side. No delay, direct reaction. Even with the "short, fast swipes" everything works fine.

I have tried cleaning it, using a different finger (thought it might be cornea on my fingertip or something), resetting it to factory settings, using a different MacBook, lettings friends try, etc. same result.

It drives me mad in certain tasks like while working in PowerPoint or any other application where you need very fine precise motions.



Has anybody encountered this issue?

Is this a giant faulty batch??

Is this just normal behavior, and no one cares apart from me???

 

[hjkelly]

I don't have any answers, but I just want to say you're not crazy! Thank you for putting this into words so well, I wasn't even sure how to describe it.

I started experiencing the same thing in the last week, but here's the catch: I've had this trackpad for 2 years and never noticed it... but I upgraded to Big Sur last week and I _think_ that may be related. Are you on Big Sur as well?

EDIT: Also, I can confirm that it's the rightmost <2cm for me. If I start at 3cm or even 2.5cm in from the right side and swipe left, it starts moving right away.

 

[cg_user01]

Interesting...
I'm not on Big Sur and never have been. I'm running Catalina.
If your trackpad is 2 years old, then I can assume that it probably wont make sense to wait a few months and try buying one again (since I have returned it again after contacting apple and having them tell me they have no clue about this issue) and hoping for a working batch. Till now I was still hoping that its a bug ... not a feature ?
Do you think it started in the recent past (since you updated to Big Sur) or do you think it is possible that it was there all the time and you didn't notice it?

 

[EvilCo_E]

I noticed this too with my Magic Trackpad today, I dropped my phone lightly on it by accident on the top right corner and then I tested it and started thinking maybe I damaged it but its like described in this post. I think I just never noticed before. Its only the right side, the left side works normally. If I swipe my finger quickly in that area the cursor doesn't move at all, if I do It in other parts of the trackpad it works normally. The bottom part (in blue) doesn't work at all if thats the first part you click but I think thats just for palm rejection. Its quite a big area on the trackpad on the right side that acts like this (the entire red area in the picture)

Edit: I tried my MacBook Pro Trackpad and it's the same. It's probably intentional, a little annoying now that I notice it though. It seems a little odd though that there's no way to switch sides (left handed vs right handed)

 

[cg_user01]

Yes! Thats the area I'm talking about that you depict in your drawing. The blue stripe at the bottom is really small and I do not notice it at all, but the one on the right is as you depict it.

BUT: The trackpad of my macbook pro (the internal one) works perfectly fine in my case (mbp 16"). No "dead zones" on any side, nothing.

I find it kinda weird that this seems to be a widespread issue and there are obviously so little people noticing it.
And I would actually assume that its not intentional and that apple does it the usual way: They probably know but dont give a crap about it until there is a lot of customers complaining. Since this does not seem to be the case, the problem just gets ignored.

 

[tomastimes]

Same issue here. Just got a space gray trackpad working on Big Sur and experienced exactly the same issue.

 

[Roshankumar]

I've been facing the same issue on a fairly new Magic Trackpad 2. I bought it just a month back and I didn't notice the issue until recently. The Trackpad is completely unresponsive at worst and gives delayed response at best and as others have already mentioned, the problem only happens 2-3 cms from the right hand side, the left and centre works completely fine.

Last night I looked all over the internet looking for a solution to this problem and even though I didn't find any, I stumbled upon this thread. Looking at @hjkelly answer, I figured that if it was working completely fine for two years and suddenly we all seem to have the same issue, the hardware is probably fine and it's the software that's causing the issue.

I decided to connect the trackpad with my iPad and see if the right side works properly or not. And it worked absolutely fine. I tested it for a good 5 minutes and there were no issues at all.

Now all we can do is hope apple solves the issue in the next update though I wouldn't be too hopeful since not many are talking about it.

If anybody finds some other solution to this, do update it on this thread. Cheers.

 

[Roshankumar]

So if anyone is still looking for the solution to this problem, I've found one but it comes at the cost of not being able to use the notification bar with the 2 swipe gesture.

· Make sure the trackpad is connected to your Mac
· Click on the apple logo on the top left hand side of your screen
· Click on system preferences
· Go to Trackpad
· Go to More Gestures
· Deselect Notification Centre

This seems to do the trick for now. Hopefully this problem will be solved in future updates.

 

[EvilCo_E]

So if anyone is still looking for the solution to this problem, I've found one but it comes at the cost of not being able to use the notification bar with the 2 swipe gesture.

· Make sure the trackpad is connected to your Mac
· Click on the apple logo on the top left hand side of your screen
· Click on system preferences
· Go to Trackpad
· Go to More Gestures
· Deselect Notification Centre

This seems to do the trick for now. Hopefully this problem will be solved in future updates.

Oh wow thanks, that worked perfectly. I never even knew about that gesture Lol. It fixed this issue on my MacBook Pro and on my Blue tooth trackpad. I'll just leave it off now, I'm honestly not confident it'll be changed anytime soon since there appears to be very little traction on this issue. But we'll see

 

[Roshankumar]

Oh wow thanks, that worked perfectly. I never even knew about that gesture Lol. It fixed this issue on my MacBook Pro and on my Blue tooth trackpad. I'll just leave it off now, I'm honestly not confident it'll be changed anytime soon since there appears to be very little traction on this issue. But we'll see

I updated to Monterey last week, hoping that maybe they fixed the problem with this update. Obviously the problem wasn't fixed. What surprises me is why nobody is talking about this. Either most already have the feature disabled so they never faced the problem in the first place, or they're just not noticing it. This is the only thread on the internet that I could find discussing the problem. I even made a new thread on AskDifferent(Stackexchange) nobody has responded yet.

 

[Confleis]

So if anyone is still looking for the solution to this problem, I've found one but it comes at the cost of not being able to use the notification bar with the 2 swipe gesture.

· Make sure the trackpad is connected to your Mac
· Click on the apple logo on the top left hand side of your screen
· Click on system preferences
· Go to Trackpad
· Go to More Gestures
· Deselect Notification Centre

This seems to do the trick for now. Hopefully this problem will be solved in future updates.

OMG! You're a life saver! I had to return my trackpad because of this issue, only to have the same problem with the new one. It was so simple! The guys at apple had no clue what was causing this issue, that's why sometimes it's better to do a quick google search.

 

[f54da]

It's an intentional delay that they added whenever the notification panel gesture is enabled. In fact if you pay attention closely you will see this behavior at the very edge of the internal trackpad as well when gesture is enabled (you have to be right on the edge. Compare behavior with the left side).

Not sure if they've changed it with the MT2, but on 10.8 and MT1 you used to be able to control gesture settings for the internal trackpad and external trackpad separately. ("defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.trackpad TrackpadTwoFingerFromRightEdgeSwipeGesture -int 0"). But on older versions there was a bug where the dead region remained even with the gesture disabled. But that's a story for another time..

 

[grinvich007]

So if anyone is still looking for the solution to this problem, I've found one but it comes at the cost of not being able to use the notification bar with the 2 swipe gesture.

· Make sure the trackpad is connected to your Mac
· Click on the apple logo on the top left hand side of your screen
· Click on system preferences
· Go to Trackpad
· Go to More Gestures
· Deselect Notification Centre

This seems to do the trick for now. Hopefully this problem will be solved in future updates.

THanks god i found this thread! I just received my trackpad 2 today, i was shoked about this issue.
I disabled that swipe from right to the center and it worked!

But I had 1 cm deadzone at bottom
I guess it was made intencially IDK
But apart from deadzone at bottom it works perfectly well.
Does anyone have the same issue with bottom deadzone?

 

[grinvich007]

Guys I just realised something. I have problems with this buttom dead zone on my trackpad and i guess i know for what is' been done -- when you use it sometimes a part of your palm can touch trackpad and bottom like leaning a bit on that buttom
And if you don't need unnecessary touches and zooms then it's really helpful.

 

[grinvich007]

something like this

 

[f54da]

Yes, there is a dead zone at bottom too. It exists on internal trackpad as well actually.

 

[leon-zym]

Thanks!!!!!!

I find this thread before returning my trackpad. It really fixs the weird issue!!!

 

[lzaiats]

I only registered to say: Thank You!
I could imagine how many trackpads have been returned because of this... This is nuts...