Chosen Solution
Hello, I recently wanted to perform a handful of upgrades on my old 2012 13” MacBook pro and came across this great site. I decided to swap out to a SSD, upgrade to max ram, new battery, and swap out the track pad. Everything has gone great so far with the exception of the track pad. It’s been giving me issues and i’m not finding a clear cut fix online. I swapped it out just as described in the tutorial here and had very little mouse movement once I powered on and rebooted. I found that I may need to loosen the center screw towards the bottom, that didn’t seem to work. still very little spare movement with seemingly random clicking throughout. Is it possible I have received a bad piece of hardware? Before I install the old track pad back I figured I’d see if anyone has any tactics to fix this one. Thanks! Update (04/13/2021) I continued to try to adjust the new track pad to get it to function with no success. I can only get very slight movement with the mouse here and there, and clicking or right clicking or any of the functions that the track pad can perform don’t seem to be working at all. I replaced the new with the old one that was in there (because I was only replacing because it was the original and I was opening the machine so figured why not) and it works perfectly as intended. Hoping with this new information theres someone out there that can help me narrow down the issue. Thanks again
Did you try reseating both sides of the ZIF cable? That little cable between the track pad and motherboard gets jostled loose pretty easily during shipping . If that doesn’t work I would assume the trackpad is bad and return it. As for the click, does it have a tactile feedback? If not its bad. We could assume that the battery is bloating just enough to keep the trackpad from clicking, but since the original is fine I’d rule that out.
mmm… Sounds like you got a bad part. Did you replace both the trackpad as well as the cable? Some sellers sell them independently. The cable has some of the logic mounted on it. That maybe damaged. Make sure the cable is properly secured in the ZIF connectors. There is a latch which needs to be folded to secure it.
