Apple Magic Trackpad with swollen battery

I don’t know about others, but if given a choice, I always prefer trackpads over regular mice (except for the cases of playing games, but the last game I played requiring a mouse was StarCraft 2 more than 10 years ago). Sometimes I don’t have a choice, for example when I go to the office occasionally after the pandemic, we are provided with an external display, a keyboard, and a mouse. The mouse is Logi’s MX Master, which is a nice mouse, but this scenario happens several times a day when I’m in the office:

• I was scrolling down with the mouse’s scrolling wheel on a page to look for something towards the bottom of the page.
• I found what I was looking for and was moving on, but the scrolling wheel on the mouse keeps scrolling with its inertia energy.
• By moving on I usually start to press the Control key, most of the time it’s for Control-T to open a new tab.
• In chrome Control-Scroll down means zoom out, so the page is zoomed out to the minimum.
• I start to curse and reset the zoom of that page in Chrome.

When I’m using a laptop, it usually comes with a trackpad so I’m good (unless it’s some old ThinkPad with a tracepoint, but I’m also ok with tracepoints, despite that I never used them for extended period). When I need to plug my laptop into an external display, I would need an external trackpad. Here comes the problem: no one sells an external trackpad except Apple.

From what I can tell, Brydge had a plan to make an external trackpad, but that plan seems to be failed and it never hit the market; Logi had an external trackpad product for a while, but it’s discontinued now; Logi currently does have an external trackpad, but they don’t sell it by itself, it’s only sold as part of the “Casa Pop-up Desk” bundle.

Which is why I was using 2 Apple Magic Trackpads (I think they are both “Apple Magic Trackpad 2”) at home.

I don’t use any Macs any more. Those trackpads are one of the 2 apple products I’m still using (the other is their thunderbolt cable). They are plugged via USB-A - Lightning (sigh) cable to an USB hub that also connects to an external display (for one of the cases the display itself is the USB hub), because I don’t want to deal with the switching of the bluetooth when I plug different computers into the hubs.

Probably because they are plugged in ²⁴⁄₇, I recently started to notice that one of them, the one I use with my laptops every day, no longer sits flat on the table. It starts to wobble, and the cause of that is most likely that the battery is swollen. The other seems to also be slightly swollen, but far from as severe as this one.

Swollen batteries are a dangerous thing, they are fire hazards. A few years ago when my Pixel Slate’s battery started to swell, I contacted Google support, and they replaced it for me for free even though it was already out of warranty. So I brought the 2 trackpads to a local Apple store yesterday.

The conversation was like this:

• Do you have the serial number of the Mac it connects to?
• I don’t use it with a Mac.
• Do you have an order number or something?
• (I searched my Gmail for “apple order trackpad” and found the order email for one of them from 9 years ago)

But apparently the order number from 9 years ago is no longer in their system. The staff then brought his own Mac, plugged the trackpad into it to get its serial number, and the serial number is no longer in their system either. He then tried the other one, this time I think he found the serial number in their system, but to no one’s surprise it’s also out of warranty (I later found the order email for the other one, that one was bought from BestBuy 4 years ago).

After talking to his colleagues, he came back with the offer: They can replace it for me, but since it’s out of warranty, they’ll charge me $109. I then looked up how much is a new “Apple Magic Trackpad 2”. It’s $129. So they only give me $20 discount for it.

I asked him to recycle the severely swollen one for me, and took the other one back home.

I actually happened to see the news about Ploopy’s new trackpad, and placed a pre-order, but my order will take months to arrive. So in the meantime I’ll have to share the single trackpad between my 2 external displays, or find some spare mouse to get by. But I’m excited that I finally have an option besides Apple, and this one does not have a battery so it won’t swell and becomes a fire hazard. If this one turns out to be good, I’ll certainly buy another one to replace my other Apple trackpad.