Keyboard randomly stops working after Leopard Install

is this affecting brand new MacBooks with pre-installed Leopard? I'm planing to replace my G4 PowerBook with a new MacBook Pro later this week, but these stories scare me a bit.

I've had 10.5 installed since the day it came out. I've accepted all updates, so I'm at 10.5.1 now. This problem just started happening for me in the last week or so. Here's my situation:

. 10.5.1 upgrade install on top of latest 10.4 system
. MacBook Pro 15" purchased 9/07
. Keyboard completely quits working but mouse and trackpad work
. Occasionally I loose only the modifier keys and space bar but can type text in web forms
. Closing the notebook, waiting a few seconds, reopen and keyboard is back. Note, the PB never does go to sleep.
. I recently purchased and installed VMWare about the same time this started happening. However, I don't use VMWare at all on the days this happens. Maybe it's time to consider an uninstall.
. No problems on my 20" iMac I installed Leopard on

I'm only seeing the dead keyboard when mobile, e.g., I'm using the laptop on my lap or some other uneven surface. When I use it on the table or granite counter top, the keyboard has never gone dead.

Thus far, when it's gone dead on my lap, I've just moved it to the counter or table and it came back. But that doesn't really tell us whether it is the torquing of the base or just some short period of time that brings it back, as others have been reporting.

I'm planning on taking it to the Apple Store this weekend, I just thought I'd add my observations.

I spoke with an Apple Genius yesterday. I explained my situation, and he told me that, yes -- Apple is aware of MacBook Pro keyboards becoming unresponsive under Leopard, and a fix is currently being developed.

I remembered this forum, and I informed him that this issue was also affecting some MacBooks, and some Tiger users. He said that this was news to him, and that he would pass it on. Hopefully, we should see a fix released via Software Update early next month.

The lead genius at the store (West Hartford, CT) offered me this useful tip. In most cases, the keyboard usually becomes unresponsive shortly after waking from a "deep" sleep (usually of an hour or more). To work around this, shut down the computer if it's going to be asleep for a long time.

I am SO annoyed...

I installed Leopard a few weeks back now, and everything was working fine.

Several days ago, i was working on me college dissertation, and both the keyboard and trackpad became unresponsive - the caps and num lock LEDs would not light up, yet the backlight on the keys was working fine.

The only way i have been able to get it working again is to press and hold the on button (since i can't shut it down with the mouse and keyboard) - funnily enough, external USB mice and keyboards work okay with it - it's what i'm using to type this message.

But as it has been occurring more frequently, i have lost very important work because of pressing and holding the on button to restart the machine.

I went to apple, and they want to take it off me for 10 days to examine... I can't part with my computer for that amount of time - i need it for my work every day.

dan55304:
I'm in a very similar situation:
. Running 10.5.1 on a fresh install of leopard.
. MacBook Pro 15" purchased 11/07
. Keyboard completely quits working but mouse and trackpad work
. Closing the notebook, waiting a few seconds, reopen and keyboard is back.
. This started the day I installed Parallels! Coincidence?

I've noticed that when I have either of my external mice (both RF wireless, not Bluetooth) the internal keyboard works without a hitch.

Earlier today the KB was becoming flaky again but I didn't have time to restart. I went to work where I had the mouse plugged in and the KB was fine for upwards of 9 hours.

Came home and it started flaking out again.

Can anyone else confirm?

I have found that rebooting in safe mode and fixing disk permissions appears to solve the problem, no matter how absurd this may sound. I will now provide as much information as possible regarding my situation.

My MBP 2,1 was purchased new mid-November of 2006, has 2GB RAM, 150GB disk, 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo. It shipped with Tiger. Applications present at time of failure include Adium, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, Cisco VPN Client, MATLAB, Eclipse, VLC and MPlayer. I bought and installed Leopard at release. By mistake, I chose to lay down the new OS on top of the existing one (ie. no archive and no reformat). I experienced intermittent freezing of the keyboard and mouse, which I initially attributed to system sluggishness. Roughly a week ago, I began to notice more permanent freezing of the keyboard and mouse which required the rebooting of the system to correct. This would appear most commonly when waking the system when it went to sleep automatically or when the lid was closed, and sometimes during normal operation. Occasionally, the keyboard and mouse would freeze during reboot. During all lockups, the input devices would remain locked up even after several minutes of waiting.

I reformatted the system completely, and reinstalled Leopard. Since I backed up my entire hard disk to a network RAID, where it was stored in two GZIP files, it took roughly 15 hours to restore the hard disk. As a result, the system remained on its first boot without restarting for the entirety of those 15 hours. No errors were encountered. When the transfer was complete, I applied the software updates. Very quickly after installing all available updates and rebooting the keyboard and mouse once again began to fail. At this point, most of the above software had been installed. The first incident occurred during normal use when the system was not asleep. On restart, the input devices were locked up, and remained so on several subsequent lockups.

Once again, the input devices remained locked up regardless of waiting, and holding down keys on the keyboard as suggested above did not help. I tried holding down the spacebar and "K" keys for 10 seconds, as well as the "K" and "J" keys simultaneously for 10 seconds, and the "K" key for 7 seconds and the "J" key for 3 seconds. Additional trials were made which I cannot recall. All were unsuccessful.

Following the advice of another poster in this thread, I rebooted in safe mode by holding down the "shift" key. After the minutes-long boot process, I launched disk utility and used the "Repair Disk Permissions" button on the system volume. Approximately 15 minutes later, the process was complete. I was able to reboot the system and use my keyboard and mouse. The keyboard and mouse have worked consistently for several hours. I closed and reopened the lid several times, as well as gave the system the opportunity to go to sleep on its own twice. Functionality remained consistent.

I have only been running again for several hours now, and have not attempted to reboot. I am very pleased with the results so far, however, and will follow up if the problem returns. It's not clear what happens to the disk to cause this issue, or why it carries over to the keyboard and mouse, or what specifically the user can do to cause or avoid this bug. Thus, it is entirely possible it may return.

I can only hope a fix is forthcoming from Apple. Since the poster who suggested the fix mentioned that they received the tip from Apple support, I can only assume that they are aware of the issue and a fix will be immediately forthcoming. If a person were to buy an MacBook Pro today, they could very easily find themselves in a situation where the laptop is useless due to the Leopard essentially lacking support for laptops, and with no copy of Tiger to rollback on (assuming they were even comfortable performing an OS rollback).

Just thought I'd add myself to the list. Took my macbook pro to see a genius today at the apple store and they said it was a known issue and to wait for the fix. I haven't tried the "fix disk permissions" route, but I do know that if I use my wireless keyboard I don't have this problem, so I guess that's what I'll use till the next update.

In my case it seems to happen most often when I use the trackpad for a while with lots of scrolling and don't use the keyboard. Usually after browsing up and down say three long web pages and then trying to use the keyboard it is unresponsive and I have to hold down a key for 10-15 seconds to get it back. Of course I've had this keyboard bug happen when I've had no programs running except the finder too.

/me keeps his wireless keyboard close

Yep, one more frozen keyboard here...

One-week old MacBook (not MBP) core 2 duo 2.2Ghz running Leopard straight from the factory. Did the 10.5.1 update the day I bought it, ran constantly since then and developed the keyboard freeze today. Not doing anything special; the machine had been in a deep sleep overnight but the freeze occurred about six hours after it woke up.

I got rid of the problem by following someone's tip of holding a key down for 15 seconds in a terminal window. Most irritating.

Doing a permissions repair right now...

A followup to this: it's been a day, and I am already experiencing problems again. It's not as severe so far, but I have found that my keyboard and mouse are intermittently locking up when I open the lid.

I really wish Apple would provide us with more information about when we can expect our laptops to work again. It is extremely disappointing to not only have my time and money wasted on something like this, but to have the company responsible refuse to provide any public acknowledgment of the issue or a timeline on which we can expect our laptops to be functional again. I have no doubt that it is not a trivial issue and that they are working on it as hard as they can, but this doesn't change the fact that my laptop doesn't work and I have no idea when I will be able to rely on it again.

I just got off the phone with the tech guys at apple and they said that they are aware of the problem, and are working on fixing it, and will most likely be fixed in a week or so (which is a estimation based on how they usually fix issues like this one) he said that a ton of people are experiencing this issue and that they are working to try and fix it. That it only happens when leopard is installed and so they are trying to figure out why leopard is causing this issue, or if it is conflicting with an outside/non mac program. I said that I didn't have anything downloaded on my computer that didn't come pre-installed aside from adobe CS3 so most likely it is leopard and they are fixing it, and hopefully they will fix it sooner rather than later!!!!

Well I'll take that as positive news.

I took by MBP in to a genius bar yesterday evening and basically got the same run around. They definitely know that this is a pervasive problem and are working to get a fix out.

That said, when the genius typed in all my symptoms, it definitely looked like he got some sort message to the effect of "we have no idea how to fix this, run interference". He looked so confused for a second and then told me that there was nothing he could do and that i should keep checking the support site.

A bit more data from my experiences...

I have an external USB mouse (wired) and even with it plugged in, I still get a dead keyboard now and again.

My trackpad, regardless of whether my external mouse is plugged in, always works during these keyboard lockups. In my mind, this rules out a hardware/connection issue since I believe (90% sure) the keyboard and trackpad share the same physical connection to the motherboard.

Finally, after reading others' experiences here on this board, I've found that if I just let the machine sit for between 5-30 seconds, the keyboard eventually returns to normal.

I'm not convinced this only happens after a deep sleep, since I'm opening and closing my laptop throughout the day and so far the dead keyboard seems random to me.

If/when a fix is found, will an Apple representative post to these boards? I'm sorta new here, so I don't know the protocol.

Here's to wallowing in patience with a few thousand other people. 🙂