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Comment by plorkyeran | Hacker News Reader

Yes, there is a very large amount of software that's involved in making touchpads work and that software is part of the OS.

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When your trackpad worked in a previous OS version and suddenly don't in the newest, that's called a software bug. Not a trackpad malfunction.

Trackpad malfunction may be hardware, or it may be software, but in either case it more clearly specified the issue than simply "software bug".

I once had a vexing problem with my old Intel MacBook — macOS failed to boot, but Windows seemed totally normal. Can't possibly be a hardware failure, right? The symptoms disappeared after replacing the SATA cable!

This reminds of the infamous GPU issues of the unibody models (the last non-retina ones). I have one such 2012 15" MBP which has a dedicated GPU which, as I understand it, has developed soldering issues.

Non-Mac OSs don't know how to turn this GPU on out of the box, so it just sits there without bothering anybody. But, for some reason, MacOS turns it on and it craps the bed, rendering the machine unusable.

I had the 2010 version of this model, with the same symptoms starting in mid 2011. I would get 5-8 crashes a day from the GPU being on the fritz.

Apple ended up replacing the mainboard in a free out-of-AppleCare repair. I never had the problem again and I used the machine regularly until about 2018.

In my case, it lasted one or two more years, and I only learned about the repair after they stopped offering it. By that time, the machine had already been replaced for other, unrelated reasons.

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