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Flakstone Author

Level 1

15 points

Mac Pro 2019: Mouse CURSOR freezes every few minutes

Hello Mac community!

The cursor on my Mac Pro 2019 freezes at irregular intervals for a few seconds at a time. I saw other posts on this, but they appear related to a specific application, low computer specs vis a vis workload, or hard drive failures. Details that might be relevant in my case:

I haven't been able to identify if any application is the cause of this; it seems to happen with nothing else running and nothing particularly strange taking place in Activity Monitor. However, even though I tested this after closing open applications and the issue was still present, I can't say for sure that a specific previously open application doesn't cause the issue to start. I usually have at least Ableton Live, Chrome, Spotify, Splice, and a few other small things running.
Restarting the Mac helps 100% of the time but the issue comes back, sometimes shortly after and sometimes a day or two later.
First Aid in Disk Utility hasn't found any errors.
I have both the magic mouse and trackpad. When the freeze occurs, neither device is able to move the cursor. I have noticed something weird about the trackpad - even at 100% it often doesn't immediately connect to the Mac, and it has had very hard time reading multi finger motions recently - after I try them a few times, it seems to "come back" to normal and works just fine.
Most of the stuff I'm running when the issue occurs runs fine on an old MacBook Pro 2017, so a high end Mac Pro 2019 shouldn't have any issues with the workload.
I'm running:
- 2.5 GHz 28-Core
- 256 GB 2933 Mhz DDR4
- AMD Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB
- Big Sur 11.4, BUT -- the issue has been happening since before I installed Big Sur.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to troubleshoot?

Thank you!

Posted on Jul 25, 2021 10:06 AM

Top-ranking reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

133,051 points

Posted on Aug 25, 2021 7:17 AM

Cursor-position updates are done at low priority in the background. So the first suspect is that you are running something, such as a virus scanner, or third-party file syncer that is using up all the spare CPU cycles, leaving no compute power to update the cursor.

We have been surprised at how badly some of this junk-ware responds when its drive is suddenly 100 times or more faster than the drive used to create it. Really weird things happen. In a Mac as powerful as the 2019 Mac Pro, while it is possible to use up all the CPU cycles, it does not seem likely.

Next is the likelihood of a bad connection of your wireless pointer devices. Bluetooth uses the very crowded and interference-prone 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band, but does frequency-hopping to dodge the 2.4 GHZ Wi-Fi data. If you live in an apartment building with lots of neighbors' Routers close by, this could be an issue.

Next on the list is USB-3. This technology is known to create noise on the 2.4GHz band in ordinary operation, and poorly-shielded peripherals and cables are a known problem that has no easy fix.

Too close to Your Router could contribute to this issue, as the signals very close to the Router are really "loud" and moving just a few feet away may provide relief.

Certain Displays, including some by LG, have been known to emit a very high level of noise in the 2.4GHz band, so getting away from the display and its cabling may help. [LG had an earlier recall so they should be especially sensitive to this issue, having been burned before.]

To cut down this list, you could try removing some possible interference generators.

If no joy, test with a WIRED pointing device and keyboard.

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Mac Pro 2019: Mouse CURSOR freezes every few minutes

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