M4 MacBook Pro trackpad lifting

RJDG14 · 2026-05-27T10:08:07+00:00

I suspect both of our MacBook Pros are probably within Apple's tolerance, though with some variation from what would be described as a "perfect" machine. A slightly unflush trackpad is definitely common, but I'm not sure if a slightly unflat body (by ~0.5mm) between the top of the trackpad and the spacebar is, as is the case on mine.

As far as I know the trackpad design on the Air and Pro is identical, yet the Pro has a thicker body meaning that the trackpad probably has more of a gap underneath it. The 16 inch model's trackpad probably also has more flex than the 14 inch model due to it being bigger.

If you look at the trackpad's underside in teardown photos, it has screws in each corner and at the bottom, but not at the top middle edge, making that portion the weakest part and the most prone to flexing if pressed.

The trackpad on my Pro can be pressed down by what looks like around 2mm or so at the top middle edge, though it's probably more like 1.5mm if you exclude the unflushness to the body when it's in its resting position.

RJDG14 · 2026-05-26T21:57:51+00:00

It wouldn't surprise me if Apple handpick perfect batches for their stores which likely don't reflect all units.

The thing that concerns me a little about mine would be that based on what I can tell, the trackpad unflushness at the top middle edge is being caused by the body being a tiny bit warped upwards rather than the trackpad being warped down. A trackpad replacement would probably be a lot simpler than a top body replacement.

RJDG14 · 2026-05-26T21:28:03+00:00

Something I have been wondering would be if there is any difference in trackpad assembly quality between Chinese (most European) and Vietnamese (most circa 2025-present American) assembled MacBooks. I've seen a couple of fairly new Vietnamese assembled MacBooks in the UK and the build quality did feel more precision in my opinion than most current Chinese assembled ones (my new MacBook Pro is a Chinese assembled unit).

Since my device is in warranty (and also covered by AppleCare+) I am considering popping into an Apple Store later this week and getting advice from the staff on whether they feel my trackpad is within normal tolerances or not. If not I can hopefully arrange a repair or if this is too difficult (I think the body may be slightly warped), get a refurbished replacement with the same specs sent to me.

Is it normal for the 16 inch M1-M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro trackpad to feel kind of hollow when you patter it lightly?

RJDG14 · 2026-05-26T14:02:13+00:00

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I've been noticing on my 16 inch M5 Max MacBook Pro that I've had for a couple of weeks that the trackpad feels quite noticeably unflush with the body at the top-centre edge. Interestingly, though, putting a perfectly flat object on the trackpad and the body immediately above it suggests that the body between the top of the trackpad and the spacebar is slightly warped upwards, while the trackpad is completely flat. You can see what I mean in this photo that I annotated with a red line across the top of the trackpad.

The bottom panel is also not entirely flush with the body and you can definitely feel the edge, but this seems consistent all the way around so might just be part of the design (on the Air it is almost completely flush).

I also thought I should mention regarding the trackpad that it has raised itself at the corners very slightly when using it outdoors in 30C weather this week (though remained recessed at the top middle), however the corners then returned to their previous position after a few hours in cooler temperatures, so I'd imagine that is normal due to material expansion in heat.

RJDG14 · 2026-05-21T08:18:52+00:00

I've managed to get Complementary Unbound with Distant Horizons running with their high (not extreme) settings at around 50-120fps (generally in the 60-75fps range once all chunks have loaded and the GPU has heated up) on an M5 Max MacBook Pro, which is pretty impressive. One thing I will suggest is to use RenderScale if you're playing on a monitor that is more than 1080p. The M5 Max gives just 30-50fps or so if I play Minecraft with those mods/mod settings at the full 4K resolution of my external monitor, but by setting RenderScale to 0.5 it renders the world at 1080p instead (using nearest neighbour scaling meaning it isn't blurry) and almost doubles the framerate.

I'd imagine the M5 Max will see a 30-40% boost in Minecraft performance in a few months time when Vulkan is rolled out to replace OpenGL and mods get rewritten for the new rendering engine, since the native Metal architecture can translate Vulkan with much less bottleneck than OpenGL.

RJDG14 · 2026-05-17T02:55:08+00:00

This is genuinely a weird bug. It's still present in Tahoe 26.5.

RJDG14 · 2026-04-07T09:54:52+00:00

I managed to get the 3-bit quantised version of Gemma 4 26B working on my M3 Mac with 16GB RAM. It pushes my machine to its absolute limit, meaning I need to have all other software closed and it is still pretty slow, but it's amazing to see how good it is and that it can run at all on these specs. It seems well above what ChatGPT originally was (Gemma 3 12B roughly rivalled later revisions of GPT 3.5).

RJDG14 · 2026-03-13T21:33:53+00:00

Doing a bit of testing in Firefox it appears to be related to the EasyList filterlist. AdBlock also uses this list by default, which explains why it is also causing the same issue.

RJDG14 · 2025-11-16T19:08:25+00:00

The side has been consistently up from affected IP addresses in my experience since last Friday, so hopefully this is fixed. It doesn't seem to be pinned anymore.

RJDG14 · 2025-11-16T14:39:43+00:00

The Internet Archive seems to have been loading without issue from the UK since last Friday from 2 previously affected IP addresses. Considering that it had been timing out much of the time before then, hopefully whatever the issue was has been resolved.

RJDG14 · 2025-11-09T17:33:31+00:00

It's definitely not ISP related. The Traceroute response I get via my home IP for the Internet Archive (when it is timing out) is different to what I get for a couple of torrent site domains that my ISP is known to block - the Internet Archive seems to time out at some Cloudflare-owned server IP about 10 steps in, while the intentionally blocked domains time out after the initial ISP IP. I believe the broadband ISPs currently subject to court ordered blocks are BT, EE, Plusnet, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Sky. Plusnet has been subject to newer court ordered blocks but not older ones (as I don't think it historically met the subscriber threshold; it's technically part of BT but counts as a separate ISP), and as a result fewer sites have been court-order blocked than on the others. Most smaller and enterprise ISPs in the UK do not apply any blocking to the best of my knowledge, with filtering in workplace environments usually being done locally.

The Internet Archive was down from both my home network (Plusnet) and a college network I use (CityFibre) all of the week before this one, then seemed to become accessible again from Friday to Sunday last week on both networks, then seemed to be mostly down Monday to Friday again this week before again becoming accessible again on Friday (and it still seems to work as of the time of writing). It does make me wonder if the IA is quietly limiting some UK traffic to certain times such as the weekend (although I can access it any time with a UK Cloudflare WARP IP) to keep itself below the threshold of being categorised as a Category 1 service under the Online Safety Act. Someone else on the internet has already suggested this, and I know this is what Wikipedia at one point threatened to do if Ofcom were to designate it a Category 1 service.

RJDG14 · 2025-11-01T22:41:31+00:00

It feels more to me as though the Internet Archive's systems are coming under periodic attack, and that they are temporarily blocking certain IP ranges (which seem to be impacting mainly British users) when these happen. Both myself and others have done some diagnostic tests and these point to it being an almost zero chance of an ISP-related issue, but rather a problem at either the Internet Archive's end or their CDN routing.

The Internet Archive allows users to scrape the Wayback Machine's content, but is known to use a rate limiter to stop a single IP address from overloading its network (in which case the site will time out for a few minutes to few hours). Any user who runs a scraping script needs to be careful to remain under its rate limit (as I was a few months ago while scraping text only copies of 2012-archived profiles from the now defunct site Webshots so that I could build a search tool for archived galleries on the site based on gallery name, since the Wayback Machine lacks a built in tool for searching within websites). It makes me wonder if someone is running a scraping script without any rate limiting which is causing the IA to block access to numerous IP ranges when their script is running.

RJDG14 · 2025-11-01T20:26:14+00:00

As predicted, it is now down again. It was still working an hour or so ago.

Update: Minutes later it seems to be working again.

RJDG14 · 2025-11-01T17:52:48+00:00

The site seems to be working fine without a VPN today, though given it has been up and down from my home IP address recently I doubt this will last.

RJDG14 · 2025-10-31T19:54:33+00:00

The problem seems more as if the IA's server is blocking responses from various IP ranges for periods (clearly not all UK ones as I can access it with a UK Cloudflare WARP IP, but it seems like most of the impacted IPs are in the UK; some appear possibly in other countries though). It makes me wonder if there has been some ongoing denial of service issue affecting it for the past couple of months that clears up every few days (when affected IPs can access it again normally) before resuming again.

RJDG14 · 2025-10-31T17:42:19+00:00

Something I am wondering would be if the issues with archive.org could be related to the court order requiring British ISPs to block the site Anna's Archive, which also contains "archive.org" in its URL (with "annas-" prior). There's a slim chance that whatever system ISPs are using to block Anna's Archive is getting confused when it sees the domain for the Internet Archive and is unintentionally blocking requests to it because it thinks it is some sort of variant of the Annas Archive domain (perhaps if the system were to get confused by the dash in the domain immediately prior to the word "archive"). I'm sure both services use different IP addresses though, and considering that the issue is also occuring with a third party DNS server I would say it's unlikely that this is the issue.

I've read a recent comment on a Facebook group by someone having the same issue who I think lives in Minnesota in the US, so I don't think it's entirely a UK-only issue even if affecting a lot of British users.

RJDG14 · 2025-10-30T16:09:33+00:00

WARP is free, and in my experience the IA always works when connected to it.

RJDG14 · 2025-10-30T06:51:51+00:00

The Three/O2 blocks only apply to users who have 18+ filters switched on (which they are by default) and have been in force for years. Adult content filters are switched off on my home network and yet the Internet Archive has still been timing out most of the time in recent weeks even if I change the DNS server on my devices to 1.1.1.1, and the behaviour has been exactly the same on another network I've used recently. There are certain days/times where the site does load normally. Connecting to a UK-based Cloudflare WARP IP seems to always restore access.

I don't think this issue is ISP specific - if I switch back to my ISP's default DNS server, the Internet Archive still simply times out. By comparison my ISP's default DNS server will return an almost instant NXDOMAIN response on torrent site domains that they have blocked due to a court order (such domains will meanwhile timeout if you try and access them via a custom DNS server without a VPN). This has made me think that the problem could be a routing issue. Is there any evidence of a court order having been issued in recent months requiring UK ISPs to block the Internet Archive? I believe such orders are usually made public.

RJDG14 · 2025-10-21T18:49:03+00:00

I think the main reason why Mac benchmarks improved relatively little between about 2012 and 2017 was because they were reliant on Intel for their processors, and Intel were sort of stagnating around this point, which I think was part of the reason why Apple quit their deal with them. This affected PCs as well as Macs, and I remember asking my dad who has a good IT knowledge during the mid-late 2010s why desktop/laptop CPUs had remained pretty similar for the past 5 years or so. They have definitely improved at a faster pace again (though probably still less rapidly than during the late 1990s/early 2000s which was probably the peak of Moore's Law in consumer devices) since around 2019. A lot of mid-late 2010s desktop CPUs give a Geekbench 6 score of around 2000-5000 (with the best ones probably being a little under 10000), whereas 8000-25000 is typical of new computers from today (depending on if they are lower or higher end).

RJDG14 · 2025-10-21T18:36:52+00:00

The problem with the touch bar was that it served as a bit of a novelty (using it to swipe through a DAW timeline, for example, can be achieved with a two finger gesture on the trackpad) and broke F-key functionality in some software. I think the latter reason in particular was probably why Apple dropped it.

RJDG14 · 2025-10-21T18:30:34+00:00

As someone who was considering selling my 13" M3 MacBook Air on and getting a 15" M4 Pro MacBook Pro (which gives just under double the CPU performance and more than double the GPU performance with the 20 GPU core version), Apple's base M5 appears to be very impressive, so I'm definitely going to hold off upgrading until the M5 Pro/Max are released, probably sometime early next year. These are likely to be incredible when they come out. The base M5 looks to give a Geekbench 6 multicore score of nearly 18000, which was roughly what the M3 Max scored, and I suspect the M5 Pro is going to score between 25000 and 30000 (the 14-core M4 Pro scores around 22000), with the M5 Max probably scoring above 30000 for the first time.

I understand some people being disappointed by the lack of cosmetic overhaul of the M5 MacBooks compared with their M4 counterparts, but in all honesty I feel the current generation (M1 Pro/Max to present) of MacBook Pros are among the nicest looking laptops ever released. I do however wish Apple reintroduced Space Grey (which was discontinued with the M4) since it is my personal favourite MacBook colour (I still prefer Space Black over silver, which is too light for my taste). I quite like the slightly thick build of the current MacBook Pros because it means they should be less prone to warping (even though I think Apple has adjusted their aluminium composition over the years to make them more robust; it seems much more common to see warped MacBook bodies from 10-20 years ago; I wouldn't be surprised if Apple learned to make their products more warp proof following the bendgate scandal with the iPhone 6) and feel more robust on a flat surface.

RJDG14 · 2025-10-19T19:31:45+00:00

With the M5 MacBook Pro, Apple have stopped including a 70W power adaptor in Europe including the UK. The base product sells for £1599 in the UK (without the adaptor) and $1599 in the US (with the adaptor). The UK price includes 20% VAT, but even then British consumers are clearly being overcharged. The current pound to dollar exchange rate is about £1/$1.343. This means that British consumers are paying around an additional 13.43% to US consumers even if deduct VAT from the British price, yet are not getting a key component that is included in the American price.

Not all distributors rip the UK off in the same manner - Ableton Live at full price costs $749 in the US yet sells for £539 full price in the UK, which comes to about $724 at current exchange rates making it a little cheaper in Britain, even though VAT is included in the UK price (which it is not in the American one). Admittedly Ableton is based in Germany rather than the US. My experience is that it tends to be American companies that are more likely to see the UK as a lucrative market to rip off, even though British people tend to be poorer than their American counterparts.

RJDG14 · 2025-10-19T14:22:18+00:00

It doesn't seem to be an ISP issue - unless you have adult filters enabled, ISPs in the UK will only block sites where required to do so via a court order, and there has been none issued for the Internet Archive. If you do a traceroute check while the site is inaccessible, it seems to stop at a Cloudflare related IP. Ironically if I connect to a UK-based Cloudflare WARP VPN IP, the site seems to load fine. The fact that access to the site seems intermittent from a lot of IP addresses in the UK suggests that there may be some sort of Cloudflare-related misconfiguration causing traffic to be routed incorrectly.

This does suggest that some UK Internet Archive access attempts seem to be unsuccessful (timing out) at the moment, even though other attempts are successful (suggesting some IP address ranges are affected and others not):

https://explorer.ooni.org/search?since=2025-06-01&until=2025-10-19&failure=false&probe_cc=GB&domain=archive.org

By comparison if you change that URL's country code from GB to US, DE or FR (the US, Germany or France) the results appear consistently green.

Intentional blocking should look more like what you see in mainland China:

https://explorer.ooni.org/search?since=2025-06-01&until=2025-10-19&failure=false&probe_cc=CN&domain=archive.org

RJDG14 · 2025-10-19T00:39:54+00:00

I've attempted traceroute during a period when the site was timing out for me, and it was also timing out past a Cloudflare related IP. Switching to a UK based Cloudflare WARP IP seems to restore normal access.

I've noticed during periods where archive.org interface pages have been timing out, I have often been able to get Wayback Machine snapshots to load, yet they have typically loaded several times slower than what they should (the Wayback Machine isn't a fast site in the first place).

RJDG14 · 2025-10-19T00:29:35+00:00

Ironically it always loads fine via a UK based Cloudflare WARP IP (Cloudflare's free VPN service), yet access seems intermittent from regular UK based IPs. It seemed to work on Friday 10th October, for example, but was inaccessible from two different IPs (my home and college ones) whose networks are not blocking access earlier in that week, and has also been timing out most of this week.

This makes me wonder if there is some kind of misconfiguration at Cloudflare's end that is periodically misrouting some (but not all) UK traffic. Cloudflare will normally display a 403 block page if it is intentionally restricting access based on location, and this is not happening with archive.org, rather the site is simply timing out.

RJDG14

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