Chosen Solution

Hey all. Have a weird issue ongoing with my trackpad intermittently becoming laggy and semi-responsive. Initially, the trackpad on my Macbook stopped working. Upon inspection, a piece of sand had gotten in and stuck between the casing and battery/trackpad cable. Somehow the heat generated caused the piece of sand to get hot enough to burn a miniature hole through the trackpad cable. Crazy. Thankfully, it didn’t go thru fully and do damage to the battery. Anyway, I’ve replaced the trackpad flex cable since and the trackpad is working again, but with intermittent issues. When the laptop is turned on, the trackpad often works perfectly. Then, during usage it starts to become semi-unresponsive. The pointer doesn’t fully track my finger movements and the haptic feedback becomes intermittent. Sometimes, this doesn’t happen at all. And sometimes it’s happening from the moment I turn it on. When this happens, it never seems to go back to full working order. A restart doesn’t fix the issue. But shutting down and resetting the NVRAM often does work, until it occurs again. I thought the trackpad cable I’d received was faulty, so I bought another one and replaced the original replacement. Same issue. So the trackpad cable is not at fault. Next step for me is to replace the trackpad itself, thinking maybe it has become defective. But thought I’d ask here incase anyone has any software related suggestions. The NVRAM reset temporary fix has thrown me off a bit. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help! From CoconutBattery:

And from Apple Diagnostics:

Screenshot of kernal_task from Activity Monitor (taken 10 minutes after turning the system on):

Sadly I think you’ve hit the limits of this system ;-{ Ruby on Rails can be very CPU intensive when you are working on larger projects. One of the issues I’ve seen with the newer 2016 onward systems is the power draw can outstrip what the battery and charger combined can supply! As wacky as this sounds! Cooling your system by running it in a freezer can allow the system to crunch away faster so the run time of the job is shorter! As it runs for a shorter duration the power requirement is less! For background here, I support a few heavy video/music artist who bought the 2016/17 systems having similar issues when they render their videos and process their music compositions. When they encountering problems we tried a few different ideas none panned out! Then I caught this vid David Lee - MacBook Pro 15 (2018) - Beware the Core i9 review it clicked! The solution is cooling the system down when rendering! So two of my video guys gave it a try and magic! The rendering jobs completed before the power ran out. While this is a workaround it clearly shows the limits of Intels CPU’s as well as Apple not sizing both their systems cooling and power solutions to meet what a pro would be asking of their systems. At this point putting in a fresh battery may buy you the needed power to stabilize your systems needs MacBook Pro 13" Touch Bar Late 2016 Battery Replacement. You may want to also look at getting a more powerful system as well. Update (10/03/2020) Capturing Activity Monitor: Top-