So I’ve been using my Macbook for several weeks now with the keyboard in a somewhat bastardised form. To recap, the keyboard on my refurb’d macbook seems to work ok if I type slow, but is complete rubbish missing lots of keystrokes if I type fast. I took it to an Apple service centre and they seemed to think there was nothing wrong with it, then I came up with a hack whereby I popped all the keytops off and stuck little bits of cardboard under the keytops to sort of give each key a bit more height and sort of make it push down a bit further when I press a key.

The ‘jammed in cardboard’ hack worked mostly OK. It was never perfect.

Meanwhile, I ordered a 2nd hand Macbook keyboard off ebay. I ordered a ‘version 2’ keyboard with the silver connector as that is what I’d read is required for a core 2 duo macbook.

Well the keyboard arrived today. One key thing is that even though it’s a ‘version 2’ keyboard, it’s actually for an older ‘core 2 duo’ Macbook than my model. The one that originally came with my Macbook has the Previous, Play|Pause and Next logos on F7, F8, F9:

Whereas the keyboard I bought doesn’t have those special keys at all. Mine has F3, F4, F5 as the mute, softer, louder buttons, F6 has the numlock light on it, etc;

So I’ve just put the new keyboard in (those ifixit guides sure are handy). So does it work better? Well, yes it does. I still miss the odd keypress, but generally the keys have a better positive key feedback (and I don’t need my little bits of cardboard either). And most impressive is that you can repeatedly tap the capslock key and the LED does actually turn on and off with each keypress. What a feature!!! 😉 The keyboard still suffers a bit from the missing first key syndrome, but it’s much much better than the old keyboard. It’s no thinkpad keyboard, but it’s a big improvement.

So, while I am pissed that Apple seem to think there is nothing wrong with the other keyboard, I am much happier with this 2nd hand one.