Mouse and keyboard freezing up in Mavericks. What do I do?

I also can't type CMD-OPT-ESC to open force quit when this happens.

Happens with all my prepherials at once my Apple magic mouse, wireless keyboard, trackpad & 3rd party USB keyboard if that's attached. It now happens every time I have a voice chat in Skype after about 60 seconds of my microphone being un-muted.

It's ridiculous that this is still happening, pretty sure it must be the same issue that affected the 2013 MacBooks that Apple released a fix for.

Ditto. Very, very frustrating. I've been blaming the Windows 8 VM running in Parallels but I've actually been able to narrow it down to Flash video running in a browser.

Having said that, when flash video is played in Safari, it doesn't appear to be a problem, yet.

In Firefox or Chrome though? Youtube will eventually kick the keyboard and trackpad off, and the sound cuts off at the same time. Heck, even the embedded "live feed" on the cnn.com site crashed my inputs.

System looks like it's operating normally, you just can't type or mouse. Even unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in doesn't work, and plugging in a mouse has no effect.

I'm running a brand new iMac 27" with a second screen (Apple monitor).

I've been a big Apple proponent for years, but if this keeps happening I cannot recommend the systems. This is actually worse than Windows in my opinion, as it's stability has been steadily improving over the years. I appreciate that Apple is trying to get new features in, but sacrificing stability is a huge mistake. I'm sure they didn't do it intentionally, but they should be moving Heaven and Earth to fix it.

I've got the exact same situation as lostspirit. 4 times in the past 24 hours, my mouse and keyboard have become inaccessible. Plugging in a wired mouse makes no difference. I have to force-quite and reboot.

The last two times it has been while a video was playing in a browser.

Just terrible.

Well, scratch Safari off the list.

Just 5 minutes into a Youtube video and whamo. Safari hung the entire system.

Again, technically it's still responding, but you just don't have any way to interact with the thing and your only choice is to hold the power switch down until it powers off.

So the problem appears to be Flash video. Apple can gripe all it wants about Flash to try to make a point, but effing Flash videos don't make Windows crash.

I get the same thing. It's always with youtube videos, the video stops loading, no webpages will load, and I get the beachball spinning when I click on the wifi symbol. Then the whole system crashes eventually and all I can do is force a shutdown. At no point does the system give me an opportunity to send an error reprt, which is very irritating. Also, I don't know whether this is relevant, but i'm signed up to the youtube html5 program as well. I would be nice to be able report these continual system failures.

chrispaz, your experience leads me to believe the issue has nothing to do with flash and everything to do with the audio driver.

Apple, if you're listening, here's a hint...

I may have narrowed this down even more.

By default, when you hook up an Apple external monitor to an iMac, the audio is redirected to the speakers in the monitor. Went to control panel, changed it back to the internal speakers, when went to Youtube and played a video I knew would crash.

It didn't crash...yet anyways, though it's 8 minutes into it. A video would never last that long before.

Why the audio driver? I have no problem with audio whatsoever.

When my system crashes, the audio cuts out as well as the input being disabled.

Now that I have the "output" on the internal speakers instead of "USB", watching videos doesn't crash my computer any more, and that's the only change I've made.

Ah ok. That isn't an issue for me, my output is permanently set to internal speakers and i'm still getting crashes when watching videos. It's pretty bad that i'm unable to report these crashes to Apple, as they're happening with alarming regularity.

Fixed on my system!

I've had this same situation since early December. It repeatably only took a few minutes of videos before I would get the mouse and keyboard freeze. This is on a brand new 27" iMac.

This weekend I disconnected all my peripherals and tried them individually, running YouTube videos until I got the mouse freeze.

It turned out that the freeze only happened when one of my external drives was plugged in to the iMac. It's a perfectly functional, although several years old, 1 TB Iomega drive. The USB cable to it appears to be completely intact - not even scratched. Since unplugging this drive - and replacing it with a new 2 TB Western Digital drive - I have run hours of YouTube videos with no freeze.

If you are experiencing this anomaly, consider disconnecting all peripherals other than the keyboard and mouse, and see if that fixes it.

I see this all the time on both the new Mac Pro and MacBook Pro 17" 2011 in Mavericks. USB hub or KVM Switch – both lose devices constantly. And since I work on Mac Pro or MBP with Thunderbolt RAID for work files, I can't disconnect my work drive. I filed a bug report for this but I hope it gets fixed.

Thanks, the audio tip pointed me in the right direction to fix an issue I was having! I have audio output directed to a Thunderbolt display on my 15-inch, Early 2011 MacBook Pro. My system wasn't crashing, but just temporarily freezing up and stuttering a lot. I had recently installed SoundFlower and suspected it might be causing the issue based on your tip so I uninstalled it and rebooted (I had rebooted prior to that as well), and now the stuttering and freezing is gone.

I have the same problem update to osx 10.9.1 no luck, on my macbookpro 15" 2010 with 8G of ram, so far i do not see any solution from apple. please find some way at least let us know what we can do to make this work.

I have try macally and gateway mouse, both of them freeze after 5-30 min, and no way to tell when this might happen.

thanks.

Just happened to me too on my brandnew Macbook Pro Retina 13. It's fully updated, so I guess that EFI fix that Apple has released doesn't work.

It happened right after I connected my Nexus 5 phone to the right USB port. Android File Transfer app started and my mouse and keyboard went unresponsive.