Pinch zoom on MacBook Pro unreliable with macOS Monterey

I'm pretty sure this is a software bug. It happened on my old 13' inch 2013 MacBook every once in a while while using Sketch. Now it's happened a couple of times on my new 16' inch MacBook Pro M1 Pro. I thought the app was the problem, but it seems from this forum it's bigger than that.

Quick Fix:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Click Trackpad
3. Click the Scroll & Zoom Tab
4. Turn off Zoom in or out
5. Close System Preferences
6. Repeat steps 1 - 3 and turn Zoom in or out back on.

It should start working again

Hi Everyone,

I also have been plagued with this... the trackpad on my 13" M1 Macbook Pro (OS X 12.3.1 Monterey) randomly stops recognising my pinches. Sometimes gesture recognition comes back after a few minutes... It may/may not be useful but it seems to happen to me more often when I'm working between multiple applications (clicking back and forth between windows) where I'm doing a lot of pinching to zoom (Miro, MS PowerPoint, Adobe CC Illustrator, InDesign).

I too have found a makeshift fix...

When it happens to me, I open system preferences and toggle the gesture 'Zoom in or out' off and on again within the Trackpad > Scroll & Zoom preferences pane. Seems to rectify it every time the issue occurs, without fail.

Hope this helps others too! It's still insanely annoying when it occurs, particularly mid gesture.

Hello fkadb,

I hope that I can help you and anyone else out that is having this problem including Apple. I wanted to let you know that you aren't the only one experiencing this issue. I 100% have been experiencing this as well. This is almost certainly due to the new MacOS. I have a MacBook Pro (16' Intel 2019). It responds the same way (meaning its tracking about half the time when pinching to zoom). This happened after updating to Monterey. A fresh install did not fix this problem, nor will safe mode unfortunately.

As far as a fix I believe this needs to be looked over by the developer team. This seems weird but I notice after asking a few of my friends to try it out - some of them had more success zooming in first try than others. The issue seems to arise from size and / or shape of the inputs on the trackpad - meaning the size of your fingers and what part is touching the trackpad (believe it or not).

Makeshift Fix

I have found a work around. However, my fix is less than ideal. Use both your hands (I use my both my index fingers) and spread them apart at the same time like your normally should be able to do with one hand. You will run into hiccups doing this but it almost always works with having fewer instances were it doesn't read the input of your fingers.

I hope this helps you out a little, and I hope an actual fix comes

Jack

Hello Fkadb,

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities. Based on your post, the zoom gesture isn't working on your Mac's trackpad or external trackpad. We'll do our best to assist with this.

Have you had a chance to test this in safe mode yet? If not, we'd test it out there: How to use safe mode on your Mac

Use sections, 'If the issue continues in safe mode' and 'If the issue doesn't continue in safe mode', depending on the results there.

Booting to safe mode would tell us if there may be extensions causing issues after start up.

If that doesn't solve it, you can test it in another user to see if it's user specific: Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac

Let us know how it goes.

Hoping to hear back, take care.

Interesting, it did work for me on a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Pro under Monterey 12.0.1.

There is another option suggested in this thread https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253320997?answerId=256313638022#256313638022

It requires the user to Log Out and then In again. It's annoying and found the Quit Dock a more bearable solution though.

Nice work, Fkadb.

If you're able to reproduce the issue on two separate Macs in both safe mode and a test user, then we'd recommend to connect with Apple on this directly: Get Support

They'll take it from here.

Wishing you well, cheers.

fkadb wrote:

Only pinch zoom is affected; other single and multi finger trackpad gestures work fine.

...

Is this a known bug? Is there a workaround?

Then it sounds like you are doing a lot better than many other people. I would love it if only the pinch gesture was flaky and unreliable.

So yes, this is known bug, at least to other users. I know of no workaround. Please run Feedback Assistant and file a bug report.

fkadb wrote:

Hi etresoft, I was on chat and on the phone with Apple customer support for a pretty long time. They appeared to be genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of this. They seemed to agree that the issue is most likely caused by a software bug, and that it would have to be fixed via an OS update.

Thanks for the follow-up. That's good news.

This may be the same bug affecting the Magic Trackpad and Mouse gestures in general under Mac OS Monterey. I found a fix on a separate thread for this bug that appears to be around since Monterey was released and Apple have not fixed it even on 12.0.1.

The Fix: Open Activity Monitor > Look for "Dock" under processes > Quit it or Force Quit.

This seemed to fix the non-responsive gestures.

Apple Please Kill This Bug

Apple seems to be in low-level denial about this. I spent over 3 hours with 4 different service advisors on the phone today trying to get help with this problem for my 2018 i5 Mac Mini, as well as a few other problems that have sprung up with Monterey. Finally it got sent to the engineering team to look at. No lie though, two of the service advisors were in complete denial about the problem. One of them kept telling me it works for him on his machine, so he doesn't think it's an issue with Monterey. Another tried telling me I needed to buy the newest trackpad for it to work properly, and that my hardware isn't working (despite everything else about the trackpad working, and having no issues with this until the update). So based on my advisor experience, I'd say it's 50/50 Apple ever fixes this, as there seems to be a mix of goodhearted genuine intrigue muddled with Apple-Is-Infalible zealotry.

Hello everyone,

I have the same problem for my MacBook Pro 13' 2017 i5 with Mac OS Monterey 12.1: the zoom with finger pinch does not work properly in all cases.

I have noticed zoom malfunctions when using a web browser (safari, Edge), and when handling pdf files (the "Preview" App, pdf reader in Edge or Safari, etc).

I hope a solution from Apple.

On my new Macbook Pro M1 Max, it literally depends on the size of the fingers touching the trackpad.

And here I am, losing my mind over this because I paid 3.700 euros for this laptop... and Apple does literally nothing about this. And many other issues with Monterey and M1s.

I have this exact problem on 2021 macbook pro max 16 inch. I mainly work with design softwares and I depend on zooming in an out. My fix so far has been to go into system preferences and turn off/on the pinch to zoom feature. That fixes the issue immediately but then it comes back.

Also when I was cleaning the screen I noticed that the gasket around the screen traps dust and if you run your finger on the gasket around the screen, you'd feel some bumps as if it hasn't been set right. Maybe just my machine has this issue.

This feels like the butterfly keyboard situation where they drag their feet to acknowledge the issues.