Leopard killing MacBook Pro keyboards?

A number of MacBook Pro owners who have upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard are encountering "dead" keyboards, discussions in Apple's support forums indicate. Primarily in the MacBook Pro forum, users are complaining that Leopard seems to be disabling their keyboards and/or trackpads, though only periodically. "Sometimes after the wake up from sleep," complains one user, "after the username/password screen, the keyboard will stop working for a few seconds, then after pressing a few keys, it will get back to work and so on, until I restart the MBP." Others have claimed dead times of a few minutes to several hours.

Although some users have been reporting similar problems without Leopard, installing the operating system appears to be more likely to trigger the problem. "Zero issues whatsoever until installing 10.5," says a user called kenji. "Now, keyboard disappears frequently and intermittently. I would have finished typing this post sooner, but my keyboard was unresponsive every time I opened a new window."

Keyboards may also be more prone to failure after coming out of Sleep mode, and it is suggested that the keyboard themselves may be falling dormant. At least one user is claiming that holding a key for several seconds may revive control; for most other users however, the only solution so far has been rebooting. Apple has not yet commented on the topic.

While Leopard has been welcomed by numerous reviewers, some drawbacks have gradually been revealed, most recently glitches in Time Machine that have in some cases produced either stalled backups or invisible backup sets.

Filed under: Apple