macOS device not responding

A touch device connected to your system has malfunctioned, with a status “Device not responding”.

In the worst case, this might mean that your touch device is not compatible with the version of MacOS installed or the Mac hardware as described below.

We are also aware that these errors can be caused if the device is malfunctioning, or if there is insufficient power to the USB device, if USB extenders are in use, or an external hub is incompatible or overloaded with other USB devices etc.

Here are some things you can try...

Check the USB cables are of good quality, in good condition, as short as possible and away from other equipment that might interfere.

Directly connect the USB cable to a system USB port.

If you have access to a spare touch device, try this to see if the same issue occurs.

Sometimes connecting via an older (USB 2) hub might help. USB2 is a lower speed than USB3.

If you are using an interim device such as a KVM or USB extender, remove this to see if the situation improves.

Upgrade to the latest macOS version with all available updates.

If you recently updated a working system to a newer version of MacOS, try rolling back to the previous version.

If you would like Touch-Base support to take a closer look, please send a UPDD diagnostic, however in most cases with this error that can not be resolved by the steps above, its likely your hardware needs to be replaced.

Device is not compatible with macOS release

The UPDD driver uses Apple's IOKit to interface with USB devices, and this is the standard and approved method of accessing USB devices.

Once the UPDD driver gets control of the device, it interfaces with the device, reads various configuration settings and then issues reads to read touch and pen data.

Once the read is issued, the low level host controller will interact with the device to see if any data is ready to be received, and when the device signals that data is ready (touch or pen is used) a read request is issued.

Unfortunately, we are seeing some touch devices that, with recent versions of macOS, seem to be incompatible with the interaction sequence from the USB host controller at the point touch/pen data is signalled as ready to be read, but none is sent to the host controller.

This results in a USB error and touch does not work. It appears this issue started with macOS 10.15 and only affects some device, the vast majority are OK.

When we request UPDD Diagnostic files in this situation, we see USB errors listed in the log at the point of touch.

In these examples, the driver has issued a read to the device and at the point of touch the host controller has returned an error.

UPDD V6 uses a 3rd party library (LIBUSB) to handle the IOKit interface and returns a Transfer Error

2022/09/15-14:56:35: DBG: Read starts for VID 0x424f PID 0x9301 EP 0x82 @bus:0001-usbix:0000
.
2022/09/15-14:56:57: ***: USB: (LIBUSB_TRANSFER_ERROR) 
2022/09/15-14:56:57: ***: USB: (LIBUSB_XXX_ERROR closing device)

UPDD V7 utilises IOKit directly and has access to specific error codes, and we can see that IOKit returns a 'Device not responding' error:

2022/10/14-20:46:36: TRC: Read started on endpoint 0x82
.
2022/10/14-20:49:02: ERR: Error from async read: device not responding(IOReturn = 0xe00002ed)

Unfortunately, we do not know why this has started happening. We have raised the issue with Apple support and the touch manufacturers.

It looks like a change has been made to the macOS USB stack, resulting in a different sequence of requests from the USB host controller that some touch devices don't correctly process.

Thus far, we believe this issue affects the following devices: