Ignore the Built In Trackpad on a Mac

0:02
In this video, we’re going to look at how we can have our Mac ignore the built in trackpad when we have another mouse or a wireless trackpad connected to our Mac. If you connect up a mouse or trackpad to your Mac, a separate trackpad, and you accidentally are triggering stuff because you’re tapping the built in trackpad. With this little trick, what you’re able to do is disable that trackpad as long as another mouse or another trackpad is connected. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go to my Mac. So I have a MacBook Air here with a built in trackpad. If I connect up another trackpad or a mouse to it, both of those tracking devices are going to work the built in trackpad as well as the mouse.

0:44
So if I were to swipe accidentally on my trackpad here, even though I have a separate trackpad or a separate mouse connected to it, what it could do is it could accidentally trigger anything if my cursor is overtop of something, I tap on it accidentally, it could trigger or open up the Messages app as an example here. So what I would like to do is I would like to disable the built in trackpad, so that doesn’t happen. So then I only have one trackpad working on my Mac or one mouse working on my Mac. In order to do that we need to go to our System Preferences, it’s pretty simple. We go up to our Apple menu here, and then we go over to our System Preferences. From here what we need to do is go over to accessibility. Under accessibility, what we do is we go over to pointer control, this is down towards the bottom so you may have to swipe up to see it. But just go and find pointer control and under pointer control when you’re looking at your mouse and trackpad, you’re going to see the option to ignore the built in trackpad. All we have to do is just turn this on. And then if I connect up a mouse to my MacBook Air here, the built in trackpad will no longer work I disconnect that mouse. The built in trackpad will work. If I have a separate wireless trackpad.

2:05
Once it’s connected up to my MacBook Air, the built in trackpad will no longer work so I can’t accidentally trigger anything by bumping it. If I disconnect that wireless trackpad, the built in trackpad will now work. So if you’re accidentally triggering something, because you’re bumping the trackpad, the built in trackpad, even though you have a separate mouse or a separate trackpad, what you may want to do is just ignore that built in trackpad when those devices are connected. You can do this in the accessibility preference pane of the System Preferences. Just go over to portion control make sure you’re looking at your mouse and trackpad and then select Ignore the built in trackpad, when mouse or wireless trackpad is present. So that’s how you can ignore the built in trackpad. When you have another pointer device, another mouse or another trackpad connected to your Mac.