Need Macbookair help

[Little green man]

Natasha has a Macbook Air laptop. Her 4 year old daughter AJ was playing on it and now the keyboard will only type in CAPITAL LETTERS plus the number row will only show the top symbols such as @#$%^% etc (and yes I’m swearing there as well as demonstrating what it does)

I’ve tried searching the interwebs and have discovered a) Macbook air help is pretty much non existent b) Mac service replies are pretty unhelpful as they assume you know *everything* about how Macs work in the first place and c) the Mac public community forums as a whole are largely unhelpful jerks that simply reply “Ha Ha.. your Macbook is narfed… teehee.. farts are funny” or something even less useful than that.

I’m a PC guy. Macs are an alien planet to me so assume I’m a complete noob and don’t know what you’re talking about specifically or where to look. Use small words and please describe even the most obvious steps on what to do.

I managed to log in to the Macbook by using an external keyboard, which is recognizes just fine and have run the keyboard viewer. All keys indicate that they are working but yet pressing caps lock turns on the caps lock light but refuses to change to lower case letters. Pressing it off again has no effect. The Fn keys only make a ‘bong’ error noise, and I don’t know if that’s normal or not.

I’ve checked that ‘mouse keys’ are disabled and all keyboard settings appear normal, but since I don’t know the original settings, that may not be the case…

So, can anybody help?

[NovaFlash]

Sounds to me like either your keyboard is fucked (shift key broken and continuously pressing down) or that you have MAYBE some ‘accessibility’ feature enabled (although I can’t think of any that does this and it frankly doesn’t make sense).

[Little green man]

I talked to Apple service online chat and they couldn’t fix it either. They thought it was the SMC and had me do a bunch of things.

It will only boot up in ‘safe boot’ mode and I can’t get the cursor into the password field properly. It only sometimes will do so with an external keyboard attached.

Anyway, they told me to take it into a service center…

[NovaFlash]

They’ll probably put a new keyboard in, since that is likely what is broken.

[Little green man]

`Went into the service center (pretty fruit loop shop if you ask me – they had their grand parents working there as well!!!) and he took one look at it and without even touching the machine said “Its water damage. That’ll be $110 to run a diagnostic, $450 for the keyboard or up to $1200 to replace everything down to the logic board” – at which point we’d just buy a new machine anyway, as they retail for about $1300 new.

So, took it home without doing anything about it. The laptop *will* login with an external keyboard plugged in and once in everything appears to run just fine. Screen is clear, things open and close, it saves and reopens, apps run… all good. So our immediate idea is to buy a cheapo Logictech wireless keyboard and just use that. Not great, but better than buying a new machine.

BUT…

Apple Care rang back to day with a follow up “How’d it go” call. I expressed my displeasure at the level of service and attitude offered by their registered and approved Apple Service provider which *they* had sent me to.

The girl bounced me up to the next level of Apple Service and he said that if I were prepared to go into a different service provider they recommend and get a formal diagnostic report from them (for free. He was surprised that I didn’t get one from the first mob but I repeated that he didn’t even bother to touch the machine, he just looked at it) then based on that report Apple would be prepared to fix the machine for free!!!

This is assuming it doesn’t need the entire guts of the computer to be replaced. He said that they aren’t prepared to replace the whole machine because its a 2012 model but he did imply that there is a “Plan B” if its something more major but wouldn’t commit to what that is at this point. (I pushed him but to no avail… I’m guessing it would be either a) a replacement but refurbished second hand machine, or b) and new machine offered at a discount price) If its just some stuck key or the keyboard as a whole then they’ll fix it for free.

(Sometimes it’s worth being a slightly disgruntled and mildly irritated customer!! :+) – but not too much because that’ll blow it and they’ll just say ‘stuff you then’.)

So anyway, I’ll take it in to this new service center on Monday and get the diagnostic report and then get back to Apple to see what they say about it all. Stay tuned for Part 4 of the ‘Great Macbook-Air Fixit Saga’!!!

[Little green man]

Well that bites..

The diagnostic came in as ‘liquid damage’ and despite their earlier assurances of help, Apple have now washed their hands of the issue.

Fuck them then… I’m definitely a PC man forever now (not that Apple will notice the loss of my economic contributions…)

Still, a $50.00 external wireless keyboard should do the trick as a work around, so the computer isn’t a complete boat anchor. Plus even then, broken ones go for $300.00 or so on gumtree trading post etc

[Little green man]

Here’s a thing…

The Macbook’s keyboard now works again after 2 and a bit months!

We were using the external keyboard reasonably happily though some things ran a little glitchy like sound and chrome in general. Then I saw that it wanted an update in the APPS. Just a standard security update…

So I said stuff it. I don’t know if this will run at all or if it will install with all the glitches this thing has but there’s not much to lose. So clicked install

It installed perfectly and completely smoothly and all looked good. So I went to open the browser to surf stuff again and by habit used the onboard keyboard. It wasn’t until I had finished the URL and the site had opened that I realised…. the onboard keyboard had worked perfectly. Upper and lower cases, numbers and special characters… all back to normal!

Now because the bozo in the shop had pulled it apart to look at the keyboard, the spacebar needs a pretty good thump to work but everything else is fine.

So, screw Apple and their clueless technicians. They don’t have a foggiest on what they’re doing. Let them just stick to their helpline script trees and be absolutely no help whatsoever!… bastards

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