Users pour forth MacBook trackpad woes

Failing to click

By James Sherwood • Get more from this author

3rd November 2008 18:02 GMT

An official Apple forum has become a sounding board for numerous complaints that the MacBook’s new multi-touch glass-covered trackpad isn't behaving itself.

Apple's MacBook trackpad: freezing after 50 clicks?

Owners of shiny new metal MacBooks grumble that the trackpad freezes after roughly 50 clicks and that it suddenly comes back to life after a further 5-10 unrecognised clicks. The trackpad, unveiled last month, doesn’t have the customary mouse buttons because the whole panel is itself a button.

Apple hasn’t made any official announcement about the problem yet, so it’s still unclear if the trackpad issue is a fault in the hardware, the software, or both.

However, that hasn’t stopped one owner from speculating that “what needs to be tweaked is the recognition of a pinch, so that both fingers have to be in motion to be considered pinching”.

According to another user’s post, the problem can be fixed by moving the trackpad's tracking speed setting - found under the Trackpad section of Mac OS X's System Preferences - up a notch.

If the problem is software related then a firmware update should, hopefully, fix the problem. If it's a hardware issue, it could prove costly for Apple which is hoping to sell plenty of the metal Macs in the run-up to Christmas.

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