wireless trackpad: misses clicks, tracks poorly right to left

Using Yosemite, iMac 5K, wireless keyboard and magic trackpad

The trackpad sometimes misses a click and sometimes doubles the click. I know that the "click" is registered by the little buttons on the bottom of the trackpad. It is on a tidy hard surface and I know the buttons are getting moved. It feels like maybe it misses if I hold the button down longer than it wants me to. But then sometimes it just plain doesn't respond. (Yes, the battery is still good, showing 81% but this phenomenon has been happening since the pad and batteries were new.) Oh, I see more now while I'm typing. If the cursor shows as a little pointy arrow, the click doesn't register. If it shows as a double-ended vertical input cursor, it does register. This perhaps means that even though the pointer has actually moved, the computer hasn't seen it.

But then sometimes one click registers as two. For example, I try to position the mouse and end up with a word (or, worse, the name of a file in the finder) selected instead. I have changed settings in accessibility to make the double click speed slightly slower, which I think might have improved the behavior a bit. On the other hand, with the previously mentioned issue when the click doesn't seem to register. When I then do another click to make it actually see the move, that is when a double or triple click will happen. This is for moves of multiple inches with more than a split second in between.

I also find that the trackpad doesn't register movement reliably especially when I am trying to move it by pushing right to left across the pad. I can position it so that multiple light strokes on the pad don't move the cursor at all. Again, this happens when the cursor is not "expecting" typing. For example, in this support communities entry box with the arrow showing instead of the vertical input thingie.

It isn't really predictable when the problem is going to appear. As you can imagine, this makes "mouse ahead" input pretty dangerous - renaming files, deleting bodies of text with the Undo not being available anymore because of going too fast.

I already returned one of these trackpads as defective. Now I'm thinking that this is actually just the design behavior of the thing. Perhaps a pad from some other mfgr would work more reliably?

[p.s. I wish if it is going to show me the time of last autosave that it would use the local system display time, not the current time in California.]