When I clean the keyboard of my MacBook Air M4 the login gets locked

When a Mac is powered off, pressing any key will cause it to power on and boot up. Personally, I just clean the keyboard with the Mac powered on and a blank text document open (Text Edit, MS Word, Pages, etc.). Then you can press as many keys as you want (as long as you don't press and hold the Touch ID / Power button since that will hard-shutdown the Mac).

SergZak wrote:

Do a Google search for "KeyboardCleanTool". It's sole purpose is to disable the keyboard so you can clean it (as the name implies). It's 100% free.

What is the advantage of that over simply opening a Text Edit page where you just need to close the document without saving after you are done? Nothing needed to add and you can even clean the trackpad at the same time.

Do a Google search for "KeyboardCleanTool". It's sole purpose is to disable the keyboard so you can clean it (as the name implies). It's 100% free.

I've been using it for many years and it does exactly what it's meant to do...nothing more, nothing less. It's also only under 1 MB in size. Note that it will not disable the track pad since you need that to end the KeyboardCleanTool app. It will also not disable the TouchID/Power button.

To complete the cleaning (the trackpad), I set the MacBook on the Lock Screen where I can then clean the trackpad without triggering much of anything except cursor movements.

Checking the Mac App Store just now, there is also an app there called CleanMyKeyboard which appears to be free as well. I have NOT tried this app (so I can't comment on it) since KeyboardCleanTool works great for me.

What you can do is boot macOS Recovery, which will preclude inadvertent password entries and the ensuing likelihood of becoming locked out.

How to start up from macOS Recovery - Apple Support

If that's the case (using the TextEdit app), then the only advantage is number of clicks required. If the app is in your dock, it's one click to open/run it, one click to close/disable it. I guess I'm just used to that simplicity.

Using TextEdit, you need to open TextEdit, pick where to create the new document, click to close it, then click Delete to delete the document. Likely quicker if you keep the document saved somewhere for this sole purpose.

I clean wipe my keyboard after activating a screensaver.

Good luck! 👋🏼😉