Splattered coffee and an Apple Magic Keyboard — a low percentage "how to fix"

© 2017 Peter Free

 

08 June 2017

 

 

Incompatibles meet

 

I managed to choke on milky coffee today. With the predictable result that my iMac's (late 2015) Apple Magic Keyboard got a little more cream-brownishly wet than it was designed for.

 

After a wipe-down, the keyboard worked for about twenty minutes. Then, some letter strokes resulted in switching apps, pages and generating random commands.

 

A few minutes later, I made the added mistake of rebooting the system. Afterward, entering my password no longer worked. Big oops.

 

Most probably, I thought, some of the keyboard strokes were not registering properly.

 

 

Diagnosis

 

I bluetoothed an iPad to the Magic keyboard.

 

The iPad's Note application allowed me to see which strokes were acting up. One key was not registering at all. And two others were generating letter-punctuation pairs, always with the same characters and order.

 

Knowing which character pairs were being generated, and in what order, allowed me to use the delete key to get rid of the character that I did not want. That knowledge — and counting password box dots — got me back into my computer.

 

The next step was to see whether I could fix the keyboard enough to continue working.

 

 

Repair

 

I did not have the luxury of waiting for the keyboard to dry of its own accord.

 

So, I popped the caps off the affected keys with a jeweler's screwdriver and used a hairdryer to blast each for a few minutes. When the bottom of the keyboard was noticeably warm, I stopped.

 

Two of the keys began working properly again, after another three hours of sitting. The third fortunately also lost its symbol pairings. But getting it to register the proper letter at all required hitting exactly the right spot on the key cap rather firmly. Even the next day, this key was still problematic.

 

Not ideal. But also not the unrepairable disaster that most people reportedly experience with liquid spills and Magic Keyboards.

 

 

Removing key caps

 

It takes some fiddling the reseat the keyboard's letter and punctuation caps, so that they are level and at the proper height. Don't be afraid to pull a cap off again to reposition it. If it seats too deeply, lever it back to the proper height with the screwdriver. You will need to move the screwdriver around the rim of the cap to do this properly.

 

It took me a few tries each to get things functioning.

 

 

Major caveat — if you have the time to be patient, use it

 

Taking the caps off the keys can result in damage that might be avoided, if you are patient enough to try letting the board dry in a warm place.

 

There are some suggestions as to how to expedite the rinsing and drying process, here.

 

 

The perverse Universe

 

Naturally the coffee-spewing incident occurred after the movers had packed and shipped both of my backup keyboards.

 

It is possible, with appropriate software, to use an iPad or iPhone as an iMac keyboard. The problem is that these devices' touchscreens are impractically slow for anyone who has to generate a few thousand words and many drafts a day.

 

 

The moral? — Sometimes you get lucky

 

As I think I did in this episode.

 

If the Universe has a history of Lucy-Charlie Brown-ing you, best plan to have a backup keyboard at all times. Or keep liquids away from your computer desk. (But who can consistently do that and work at the same time?)