mavericks cursor disappears

"Disappear" in my case means that the text cursor failed to change to an arrow head when dragged off the text page onto the desktop. Being a small thin bar, it was invisible against the background, whereas the arrow head is big enough to be obvious. Fortunately I have Mouse Locator, which generates a green circle at the mouse location for a couple of seconds after pressing F5.

I had to do this frequently when I couldn't see the mouse. Amazingly, changing the energy saver to 20 minutes for display sleep and 21 minutes for computer sleep cured the problem. They had been set at 15 minutes each long ago, before Mavericks.

Thank you.

Nick

That's interesting. The link to the branched discussion says it is restricted.

Oh by the way I came here because this just started happening to me as well.

Same problem here. Usually happen when I have multiple Windows in Safari. If I tab away from Safari and then back the cursor is back - for a while. Been going on for a long time and really hope for a (real) fix and not just work arounds.

Same situation with a wired mouse and no other pointing devices hooked up.

Seems to happen most often with Safari.

I've had this problem too and it has perplexed me what could be the cause. After some thinking, and inline what others have said, it usually happens when firing up an app or switching between apps.

My guess is that this happens when OSX is switching graphics cards. This is entirely my theory so lets see if it holds water.

The mouse cursor on OSX is drawn directly by the graphics hardware (hardware cursor acceleration), as with most modern systems. Maybe there is a race condition where the cursor overlay doesn't get mapped to the new graphics card before the switch happens, so the OS switches to the new graphics card before the cursor overlay is ready. So my guess this problem only occurs on systems with discrete video cards (NVIDIA, AMD) alongside the internal (Intel GMA) one. Systems with only one graphics card probably don't see this problem.

After browsing through this thread, the users who have included system information all have discrete graphics cards in their system, which confirms this theory. Likewise, my system is a 15" MacBook Pro Retina Mid-2012 with an NVIDIA GT650M discrete graphics card running OSX 10.9.5.

If a user with a single (integrated) graphics card is also seeing this problem then i'll eat my words 🙂

Here is a test and possible solution, if you have a system with discrete graphics, in System Preferences -> Energy Saver, untick Automatic Graphic Switching and the problem should go away. This forces the system to always use the discrete graphics. Not a great solution though if you are using your mac primarily on battery power as the discrete graphics uses more power.

A proper solution would be for Apple to fix the issue in the automatic graphics switching (gMux) implementation.

Cheers,

David

Same problem. What works for me is switching to another window or application and then back. Cmd-Tab to another window. Absolutely crazy and not very user friendly at all. The issue only started when updating to 10.9.5. Another oddity....The update showed in notifications and on the App Store to just update now. Go to Apple downloads or the support article for this update and they "highly" recommend you back up everything first. That is always a red flag to me. It's like they don't trust it themselves. Thanks Apple engineers.

I don't have that option in energy saver settings. I have had the missing mouse issue since Mountain Lion. It was rare then but with mavericks it happens several times a week. It mostly occurs switching between firefox and other apps. Only graphics device I have listed as AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB graphics. Is that an integrated one?

I changed my display/blanking settings and now the cursor doesn't disappear it is getting stuck on the black pointer with the blue ball instead but at least I can see it 🙂. It's been stuck like that for several minutes. Restarting finder doesn't clear it. Opening system info did clear it but may be coincidental.

Does anyone else use a wacom tablet? I wonder if it is a wacom issue. I use an old one with the mouse so it is being used all the time. I have had several UI glitches including disappearing scroll bars since using mavericks.

WOW!

I just upgraded an from my old 32bit iMac to a new MBP with 16g ram and an i core 7 processor, only to discover that my brand new $3K laptop can't even provide me with a functional mouse!!!

Worst still, i now read apple has been aware of the problem for well over 12mths and it STILL not fixed.

I upgraded because i finally tired of all the glitchy crash causing bugs that my iMac had developed.

Looks like that might have been a $3K mistake. The 2 x $800 PC's i bought for my kids seem to function perfectly.

Seriously considering taking this MBP back and exchanging it for one of those, now.

Would never have happened when SJ was alive and in charge. Apple has really lost its way since he left this earth!