How to repair a Mac keyboard



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Prepare your compressed air.
Photo: Gizmodo

Since Apple introduced its butterfly keyboard in 2015, its problems are very well documented. These are problems that I have also encountered with a MacBook Pro 2018 (the one with the third revision of the butterfly keyboard, if you take into account). If yours does as well, here's what you can do.

You'll find a long list of stories on the web, so here's mine, briefly. A few months after buying the MacBook Pro, some keys began to repeat themselves. The "o" and "i" keys are particularly sensitive. However, after reading other complaints online, it seems that any key can be a victim of the problem.

Shortly after, the spacebar also began to work. Now, I only receive what I expect (a space) about three quarters of the time. For the remaining 25%, a myriad of things happen that should not. Sometimes he does not record a tap at all, sometimes he taps two taps, and sometimes he gets really crazy and responds with a space, a dot and a space again.

For those who write for a living, this is not ideal: it is quite difficult to get readable sentences together without having to go back and edit half again to remove typing errors introduced by the design of the low profile keyboard of Apple.

You can probably imagine the frustration of signaling the launch of the Apple iPhone 11 with a spacebar and a temperament keyboard. Transcribing Tim Cook's speech about creating "products and technologies designed for the benefit of humanity" is much more difficult when you have to go. back and add spaces and delete superfluous characters. And me was not the only one.

Thank you, Unshaky, for blocking 3 454 ghost presses.
Screen capture: Gizmodo

This is where we are (and where I am). The butterfly keyboard was revised for the fourth time in May, and we all hope that Apple will finally have solved the problem four years later. It looks like we're still trying to protect the keyboards from dust and debris. he did not say what this material consisted of, nor, Apple being Apple, talked a lot about it.

This kind of story is not new. Therefore, if you have the same problem, what can you do? First of all, I must tip 9to5Mac and the incredibly useful (and free) application Unshaky, which attempts to quickly identify and block double keypresses. If, like me, you're waiting for the right time to take advantage of the repair program, it may leave you with a few months of room for maneuver.

Unshaky is unobtrusive in the menu bar and you can disable it for some keys if you have problems with only a few. The number of accidental (ie, keyboard-linked) presses it has managed to block on my MacBook Pro is around 3,500, which means my laptop has been at least usable, while Apple has decided how to handle the problems of his keyboard.

The solution proposed by Apple to the problem proved much less effective than Unshaky, at least for me. This suggests blowing the problem a bit, by holding your MacBook at an angle rather than using a can of compressed air to navigate the keyboard up and down and left and right. For best results, hold the straw of the box about an inch away from the keyboard, Apple said.

Apple has a guide on how to clean your keyboard.
Image: Apple

Reader, I tried: it did not help. The sentences always appear with more bones and is only what I need and without enough spaces. It is possible that my air-to-air technique is not up to par, or that the air itself is lower, but the problem still persists to this day.

The good news is that Apple has decided to replace every defective keyboard (originally, my third generation butterfly keyboard model was excluded from the repair program). This goes back to the 2015 MacBook models and covers everything because the program only extends over four years. You will need to act quickly if you have one (although you may have already fixed a patch). .

You need to go to an Apple Store, or an Apple Authorized Service Provider, to upgrade the keyboard to the latest fourth-generation model, which we do not think is spoiled by Spacing or repeated letters. Alternatively, you can simply get some of the replaced keys. Check out the official support page for more details.

The agreement even covers the 2019 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, which does not reassure us that Apple thinks that its keyboards are robust enough to handle a little typing.

I hope that a professional repair in the Apple Store will be enough to get me a MacBook Pro with a keyboard that works. All I have to do now, it is clear a few days in the diary when I do not need a laptop. .

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