My MacBook Keyboard Is Broken and It's Insanely Expensive to Fix

The right arrow key on my Macbook Pro keyboard stopped working the other day.

I say “stopped working”, but technically it works too well now, it is being pressed constantly, which makes the laptop pretty unusable.

After getting over the initial frustration of being the owner of a broken device, I cleaned it. Took the keycap off, used a blower, a brush and even alcohol.

Nothing worked.

Next, I went down the route of trying to figure out how to repair the thing. In my naivety I thought, this should be simple, order a replacement keyboard, take the laptop apart, replace the keyboard and good to go. But no.

Apple has decided that the part the users interact with the most should be the hardest to replace. They do this by riveting the entire keyboard assembly to the top case. Meaning you can’t just replace the keyboard, you have to replace the entire top case. A replacement keyboard was around €50, a top case replacement part is around €730. This is like 1/5 of the price of my entire laptop. And only if I want to try to do the repair myself. So add another €100 to pay an authorized repair shop to do it.

This is absolutely insane.

After thinking about it for a bit I decided to remap all the arrow keys using Karabiner Elements . I disabled the right arrow key and mapped capslock + J K L I. And donated $10 to the project. A small price to pay to postpone a very expensive repair bill.

Sometimes you have to feel the hurt on your own body to fully understand the absurdity of the world, and I felt the hurt on hardware repairability this week. Hopefully when this laptop fully dies I’ll remember this experience and choose to buy a more repairable laptop like a ThinkPad or a Framework laptop.

Here’s hoping governments regulate laptop manufacturers to actually make repairable machines in the future.