Broken MacBook Pro keyboard
A few days ago Magdalena and Doug were messing about and Doug caused Mags to laugh really hard, when she had a mouthful of water, when she was using her laptop. As such, she now has a semi-functioning keyboard where some letters, like “S”, “E” and “X”, just don’t work. Or maybe she’s worn those ones out independent of the spill.
Her MacBook Pro is a hand-me-down. I didn’t need two, so when we replaced our units at work last year, Mags got my old one. It’s about three and a half years old, which makes it six months since the extended Apple Care expired. On top of that, I doubt Apple Care covers liquid damage to the keyboard.
The good news is that the rest of the computer seems to be working fine, so a new keyboard should do the trick. I had a look around, and whilst it’s not easy, there’s definitely resources online that provide instructions on how to remove and replace the MacBook Pro’s keyboard. I reckon it’s a task I can undertake.
In the mean time, I’ve bought a wireless keyboard that Magdalena can use. Coincidently, it sits over the inbuilt (broken) keyboard almost perfectly, so it’s a great short-term replacement, as indicated by the thumbs-up in the photo.
The wireless keyboard won’t be useless after I repair her laptop. Tony’s been using one of the pairing keyboards recently and seems to like it, so I’ll bring it into the office when we’re finished with it.
Initially I had some problems with the Bluetooth keyboard not pairing with her machine, and I couldn’t install the system patch because it required Magdalena’s password, and one of letters that’s broken is used in her password. Talk about a vicious circle! Anyway, the patch was for Mac OS X’s Java install, so I didn’t think it would make any difference. I plugged in a standard USB keyboard and used that to get the patch installed, and when her Mac rebooted it was playing nicely with the Bluetooth keyboard. Maybe another coincidence, or maybe the patch was mostly an update to Java, but had other things, or maybe it just “reset” some bit on a chip somewhere. Either way, it’s all good now, and we have a replacement keyboard being shipped on Monday. It looks like I’ll be doing some laptop surgery in a week or so.
Maybe Emma or Chanel can lend me their scrubs and a face mask.
You can borrow my dissection tools too, if you like. They haven’t been in *many* cadavers.
I actually ordered the three tools that are needed to dissect the Mac with the replacement keyboard component, so those tools are probably not needed. If you had a big head reflector then I’d definitely need to borrow that.
I thought it was a cool idea that they offered to “up-sell” me the right size screw driver, torx head driver and some other gadget that I’ll apparently need. The tools were about $5 each, so it’s a no-brainer.
That reminds me of the good old days when USB printers used to ship without USB cables. I believe that has changed now.
They still sell the USB printers without cables, cost cutting, last few I’ve bought haven’t had a cable.
If they do provide one its usually just a foot long like the PS3 controller charge cable, 1 foot in length, luckily Apple give a few USB extensions, I just use those :)
On the keyboard subject, I find I push the wrong keys on the desktop wifi keyboard but not the MacBook Pro for some reason, even though its the same keyboard and layout.