qwerty row on macbook air won't work from time to time

Still waiting for someone who can solve the issue.

My keys does not work: wertyuio.

When i open my macbook air they dont work. I have to hit them randomly for minutes to make it work intermitently. But when i have been working in the mac for 30 minutes they work normally.

I also have this problem. I've found that by bending the whole macbook chassis slightly (for instance by holding it by one hand on left hand side so allow gravity to bend it) the keyboard always works. Hammering on the top row of key also work sometimes.

So it is clearly a hardware issue. I wonder if some kind of quick fix by taping a loose connection or similar could fix it.

Can it be related to the battery swelling (or similar)? I replaced my battery to a non-original battery a few months ago.

The macbook air is old though, so I suspect there is nothing else to do than to deliver it to Apple of buy a new.

I'm having this problem too, and I've found it mentioned on a bunch of other forums. A few more observations: it's transient, sometimes they come back. It used to be rebooting fixed it, but now it doesn't. I can type the characters on an external keyboars.

I just tried the hack guillaumecout suggested of pressing every key, and that did indeed make mine start working again. This is very odd, and I think it started with one of the recent upgrades.

This is not a problem that would have been caused by an upgrade. This is a hardware issue with your keyboard. Putting pressure on it, by pressing all the keys, can be a temporary fix for some, but it's unlikely to be a permanent fix. You need to get the machine looked at by Apple.

What you say is very sensible, but why would so many people suddenly have this problem now if it's hardware?

By the way, I did stop by my local Apple store a week ago on my way to work, but they didn't have any slots open before I needed to lecture, so I rebooted. But I spoke briefly to a "genius" and he'd never heard of the problem, so that also makes it sound very recent & not hardware related (I have an old air.)

jjbryson wrote:

What you say is very sensible, but why would so many people suddenly have this problem now if it's hardware?

Because you're looking for it now, and because of the number of other Mac users out there, you will always find reports similar to whatever problem you're having. You would have found similar reports if you had searched for information about the same problem a year ago, or two years ago, etc. Do not attempt to draw statistical conclusions from Google search results.

Also, pay attention to dates on the pages you're finding. What you're finding may not actually be " right now." For example, the post you responded to initially is from 2012.

I have the same issue, started a few weeks ago. It was very transient and now it is all the time. If I boot into safe mode it never happens, which makes me think it is software.

I have been to a genius bar and he insists that I reformat before he will replace the keyboard for me. He want to confirm it is definately not a software issue. he suggested it could be drivers or a key monitoring daemon running in the background that is intercepting and blocking the keyboard strokes.

It is only EVER q w e r t y u i o p that it happens to nothing else ever.

I use Alfred, Better Touch Tool, and an app that can resize windows with keyboard shortcuts. Quitting these doesn't stop the issue, but as I say it never happens in safe mode, it it must be software.

HELP by posting your experiences.

I totally agree that it is weridly intermittant and might be software. I took it to the genius bar & they reseated everything AND wiped some software that they thought might be the issue and it worked fine for a few weeks but it is back to intermittent as heck. I respected the people who said the trick of doing the keys in order was about pressure and tried to figure out a physical regularity that reset it but it seems way, way more like software. I guess I'm a a plausible candidate for key monitoring– I travel a lot, hold two passports, was in China last August, have had US govt funding a few years ago. But it still seems bonkers too that software would need kicking / resetting so intermittently. Can you get your genius to say anything about this key tracking software theory?

There's nothing about a hardware problem that requires it to be consistent. Hardware problems can very easily be intermittent, and often are exactly that.

Note that it is an unfortunate truth that Apple Geniuses are entry-level techs, and thus often know absolutely nothing about things they haven't been specifically trained about. Thus, a Genius' guess that this might be due to a "key monitoring daemon" is probably not worth any more than a guess made by the most inexperienced participants on this forum.

If it were actually a keylogger, why would it block only the input from a single row of keys, having no relationship to each other except their physical arrangement on a QWERTY keyboard, and nothing else? That makes no sense at all.

A hardware problem is literally the only thing that makes sense.

I have to agree with you Thomas, it is a pain I am being forced to format to prove it to the genius. Can you boot a mac from an external drive to save me wiping the ssd?

Can you boot a mac from an external drive to save me wiping the ssd?

Yes, you can. So you could just install a fresh copy of OS X on an external drive instead of wiping your system. Hold down option at startup to select which drive to boot from.

Alternately, you could hold down command-R to start up in recovery mode, then select the Get Help Online option. This will open Safari while running in a clean, very minimal system. Then just try typing in the address bar. If the problem occurs there, you've proven without a doubt that it's hardware and not software.

You could also try connecting an external keyboard. Then, when the problem happens, try typing on the external keyboard and see if that works just fine. If so, that's also conclusive evidence that it is hardware.

Whether these things will satisfy a by-the-book Genius or not, I don't know. They should, but they may not. If they don't, you should consider that conclusive proof of the ignorance of the Genius! 😁

I'm going to get the Geniuses to replace my keyboard. It only costs about £100 and it's been more than that in hassle. Has anyone tried this, are they sure it works? (I think I'm still under warranty, but my geniuses came up with a pile of poo about beverages last time they worked on it & I can't be asked to waste my time on them, either.)

I've took my mac back to my Apple store (who know me) and they ordered hardware to replace my keyboard and motherboard (they're going to do it on warranty). BUT I'd logged out because I know they don't do that for you, and now everything is working fine again. I assume it will stop working again in two weeks like before.

thomas_r. wrote:

…A hardware problem is literally the only thing that makes sense.

No, it makes no hardware sense that logging out without shutting down clears the error, but shutting down without logging out does not. This must be a software thing, though admittedly (by your arguments) something device-specific – maybe at the driver level?

I figured out they keys weren't working when the laptop was hot due to lots of processes running, so I let Apple replace the two parts, but then the laptop didn't work – the uninformatively named "kernel_thread" constantly used 320-400% (on a dual processor?) of the CPU. So they gave me a new laptop (they said "exceptionally", but I suspect the overheating & CPU issues were the real problem in the first place). Annoyingly they only copied over the user accounts and not all my applications that were installed (my own time machine backup wouldn't finish loading...), so I burned 6 hours on that day and now am still trying to get my laptop back to a full state of usability, but at least the keyboard works, and I haven't smoked the CPU on anything yet (even though theoretically the processors are slower -- they replaced a 1.8 with a 1.4).