MacOS – Causes of Random Giant Mouse Cursor

macosmouse

After upgrading my late 2012 Mac Mini from Yosemite to Sierra I notice a weird occurrence – briefly when moving the mouse it suddenly jumps to about 10x the normal size for just a tiny moment.

A timed screen capture from Skitch shows this happening:

big mouse pointer in macOS

What on earth could be causing this?

Best Answer

El Capitan introduces a feature for finding a mouse cursor you've lost. Shake the mouse around and the cursor will increase in size whilst you're shaking so you can find it.

Here's the moment it was introduced in the Apple Keynote at WWDC 2015:

Keynote moment

You can disable this feature in System Preferences → Accessibility → Display.

Shake mouse pointer to locate
Quickly move the mouse pointer back and forth to make it bigger.

Shake mouse pointer to locate