Chosen Solution
Hi Guys, Recently some of the built-in keys of my 13" macbook pro (early 2011) have suddenly stopped working. I mean, this came really out of the blue sky. The day before everything worked perfectly and then the next morning when I turned on my laptop some of the keys (like the spacebar, delete key, etc) suddenly won’t work. And no, I didn’t spill any liquids on my keyboard nor my laptop didn’t fall or something… I tried every possible solutions I could think of to fix the problem without taking the entire thing apart, like resetting NVRAM, PVRAM, etc. but nothing helped. What can be the problem actually? I was today at an apple-store and (as I expected) they recommended to exchange the entire top case for an insane price of 460 Eur. I mean come on, for that price I can buy a new decent consumer laptop for god sake. Anywho, my question is, is there something else I can try or do I have to try to replace the top-case myself? (Although it looks pretty tricky the whole procedure) Curse these !@#$ unibody cases!!!
While spilling something into the keyboard is often the cause, sitting the system down on a wet surface can also mess you up. I would first take the bottom cover off to see if the system got wet that way. You can also try carefully disconnecting the keyboard ribbon cable as outlined in step 11 in the uppercase guide (make sure you first disconnect the battery). Using care wipe the contacts down with some Isopropyl alcohol with the grain of the contacts to see if that was it. Otherwise its time to replace the top case - Sorry ;-{
