MBP Dancing Touchpad

[mediaman0610]

Has anyone else experienced issues with touchpads since updating to Sierra? Particularly built in touchpads on Macbook Pro's?

My touchpad was working just fine until the update. Since then it has gotten more and more troublesome. Occasionally it will work fine after a reboot, but it will soon begin to dance around and be unresponsive.

Beyond the basic PRAM, reboots, malware scans, and disk permission repairs I am out of ideas. I'm hoping it's a software thing.

 

[keysofanxiety]

What model of MBP do you have, please?

 

[mediaman0610]

What model of MBP do you have, please?

It is a 2012, I bought it around December of that year.

 

[keysofanxiety]

It is a 2012, I bought it around December of that year.

13" or 15" please? Also does it have a DVD drive?

 

[mediaman0610]

13" or 15" please? Also does it have a DVD drive?

15" and yes.

 

[keysofanxiety]

15" and yes.

Have you struggled with battery life recently, or get any battery warnings?

Also is there an Apple Store local to you?

 

[mediaman0610]

Have you struggled with battery life recently, or get any battery warnings?

Also is there an Apple Store local to you?

The closest Apple store is at least an hour-and-half away. But my battery has been fine, maybe it doesn't hold as good of a charge as it used to four years ago, but it sill does pretty well.

 

[keysofanxiety]

The closest Apple store is at least an hour-and-half away. But my battery has been fine, maybe it doesn't hold as good of a charge as it used to four years ago, but it sill does pretty well.

OK. I'm just thinking what could be causing the trackpad to dance about. Possibilities off the top of my head are:

1) Wireless/wired mouse interfering. Have you ever set up a Bluetooth mouse or have a dongle plugged in?
2) Something on the trackpad causing interference. Have you tried cleaning the trackpad with a software cloth?
3) Hardware failure or liquid/physical damage.
4) Possibly battery expanding, causing the interference...

It's difficult to say as you've gone through all the usual stuff with PRAM/SMC reset. It's unusual that the Sierra upgrade made the problems manifest... you can try:

1) Hold CMD+R on startup
2) This will boot into OS X Utilities. Select 'reinstall OS X/reinstalll macOS'.
3) This will not delete your user data. It will only reinstall the core macOS components. (Make a Time Machine backup anyway, though!)