Trackpad or Keyboard
Not Working on Your Mac?

Four Causes Cover Almost All of It

A keyboard or trackpad that stops working feels like a big failure because there's nothing to look at — no error message, no beep, no cord to wiggle. But behind the scenes there are only a handful of things that actually go wrong: power, the connection, a setting, or something physical like a crumb or a spill. You can rule them out one at a time, and none of it costs money.

One question splits the problem in half before you start. Is the thing that stopped working built into the Mac, or is it a separate piece you can pick up? A MacBook's own keyboard and trackpad are wired inside the lid — they don't use Bluetooth at all, so battery and pairing steps don't apply. An iMac, Mac mini or Mac Studio uses separate accessories that do. These steps are written for macOS Tahoe 26, the version most Macs are running in 2026, but they land in nearly the same places on the version or two before it.

Start Here: The Six-Step First Pass

1. Restart the Mac. Apple menu → Restart… — a real restart, not just closing the lid. It's the single most effective step on this page.
2. Wireless? Check the switch. A Magic Mouse has it underneath; a Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad have it on the back edge. Slide it off, count to five, slide it back on so green is visible.
3. Plug it in. Connect the accessory to the Mac with its cable, wait one minute, then disconnect. Apple's own instructions say this pairs the accessory with your Mac and charges the battery — most people have never been told that.
4. Laptop keyboard totally dead? Plug the Mac into power. Apple notes there may be a low-battery alert on screen you can't see, and the Mac is waiting on it.
5. Check the charge. Click the Control Center icon in the menu bar, then click Bluetooth to see battery levels for your accessories.
6. Dry your hands and wipe the trackpad with a dry, lint-free cloth. A trackpad reads skin, not pressure — lotion and damp fingertips genuinely make it stutter.

The Settings That Make a Good Keyboard Look Broken

• Slow Keys — you must hold a key down longer than usual before it registers, so light typing does nothing. Apple menu → System Settings → Accessibility → Keyboard (scroll if needed) → switch it off.
• Sticky Keys — Shift and Command latch on instead of needing to be held, so ordinary letters come out as shortcuts. Same place: Accessibility → Keyboard. Watch for the option that toggles it by pressing Shift five times — that's how it gets switched on by accident.
• Mouse Keys — keys move the pointer instead of typing, so part of the keyboard goes “dead.” Accessibility → Pointer Control → make sure Mouse Keys is off. This one causes more false alarms than any other setting on the Mac.
• Full Keyboard Access — Tab moves a highlight around the screen and typing lands on a button instead of your document. Also under Accessibility → Keyboard.
• The fast way to check all of them: press Option–Command–F5 to open the Accessibility Shortcuts panel and untick whatever's on. On a Mac or Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, quickly press Touch ID three times for the same panel.
• None of this is a sign of anything wrong with you or the Mac. These features ship on every Mac on purpose, and they're switched on with quick key combinations — which is exactly why a sleeve, a cat, or a visiting grandchild can turn one on.

Forget & Re-Pair a Magic Keyboard, Mouse or Trackpad

1. First, make sure you have another way to control the Mac — a laptop's built-in trackpad, or a cheap wired USB mouse. Never “Forget” your only pointing device.
2. Apple menu → System Settings → Bluetooth in the sidebar (scroll down if you don't see it). Check that Bluetooth is on.
3. Under My Devices, Control-click the accessory's name (hold Control, click) and choose Forget. Confirm.
4. Restart the Mac. Optional — but it makes the next step far more reliable.
5. Put it back in pairing mode the easy way: connect it to the Mac with its cable for about a minute, then disconnect.
6. If it doesn't reappear on its own, look under Nearby Devices, hold the pointer over the name, and click Connect.
7. What Forget does: it erases only the introduction between that accessory and that Mac. No files, no settings, nothing on your iPhone or iPad. It's the safest reset button in the whole guide.

Cleaning It the Way Apple Says To

• Power it off first — shut down the Mac, or switch off the accessory and unplug it.
• Soft, lint-free cloth only, barely damp with water. Not paper towels, not a dish towel, nothing abrasive.
• Never spray anything directly onto the device, keep moisture out of every opening, and skip aerosol sprays, bleach, abrasives and anything containing hydrogen peroxide.
• For disinfecting, Apple says a 70% isopropyl alcohol wipe, a 75% ethyl alcohol wipe, or a Clorox Disinfecting Wipe may be used gently on hard, nonporous surfaces such as a keyboard — but never on fabric or leather.
• An unresponsive key on a MacBook: Apple's method is canned compressed air with the straw fitted, held about half an inch away, can kept upright. Hold the laptop at about a 75-degree angle and spray the keys left-to-right; rotate onto the right side and repeat; then the left side. If the key is still dead after that, Apple's advice is service.
• The mistake I see most is window cleaner on a cloth, or a wet wipe run over a laptop keyboard. Liquid inside is the one problem here that turns a free fix into an expensive one — and Apple is clear that liquid damage isn't covered under the warranty or AppleCare.

Trackpad Behavior That Looks Broken and Isn't

• “It doesn't click when the Mac is off.” That's normal. Apple states plainly that a Force Touch trackpad doesn't click or give haptic feedback when it's turned off — the click you feel is generated electronically, not by a hinge. It's the most common false alarm on this topic.
• “Tapping does nothing; I have to press down.” Tap to click is a setting: System Settings → Trackpad → Point & Click → turn on Tap to click.
• “Scrolling goes the wrong way.” Also a setting, under Scroll & Zoom in Trackpad settings. Whichever direction feels right to you is the correct one.
• “The firm press stopped doing the pop-up thing.” That's Force Click — Trackpad → Point & Click → “Force Click and haptic feedback.” Apple notes the setting only appears on trackpads that actually have Force Touch, which covers most modern Mac laptops and the rechargeable Magic Trackpad.
• Pointer jumping or drifting? Dry your hands, watch where your palms rest while typing, take off any thick case or wrist rest, and try it with the USB hub unplugged. Then adjust Tracking speed in Trackpad settings — slower is easier for unsteady hands.

The Two Free Tests That Settle It

1. Safe mode starts the Mac with only Apple's essentials loaded, which tells you whether other software is the cause. Apple silicon Mac: Apple menu → Shut Down, wait until the screen is black, press and hold the power button until “Loading startup options” appears, select your disk, then hold Shift and click Continue in Safe Mode. Intel Mac: restart and immediately hold Shift until the login window appears.
2. Look for “Safe Boot” in the menu bar. Works fine in safe mode? The hardware is good and something you've installed is interfering. Just as broken? That points at hardware. To leave safe mode, restart normally — there's nothing to undo.
3. Apple Diagnostics is Apple's free built-in hardware test. Shut down, disconnect everything except keyboard, mouse, display and power. Apple silicon: hold the power button until you see Options, release, then hold Command–D. Intel: turn it on and immediately hold D (or Option–D).
4. On macOS Tahoe 26 and later, Apple now asks which diagnostic you want to run — including one specifically for the built-in keyboard and one for the trackpad. Write down any reference code it gives you; that code is what turns “it's acting funny” into something a repair technician can act on.
5. A clean result isn't proof of perfection. If a key fails only sometimes, keep a written log of when it happens. That log is worth more at a service counter than any test result.

When to Stop — and the Scams to Ignore

• If liquid got inside: shut the Mac down immediately, unplug it, wipe the outside dry, and get it to an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider as soon as possible — that's Apple's own guidance. Don't use rice, don't aim a hair dryer at it, don't open it up. Speed matters more than anything else here.
• If a MacBook trackpad won't click and the case looks odd — the laptop rocks on a flat table, or the bottom looks slightly bowed — stop and have it looked at. Batteries can swell with age. I'm hedging on purpose because I can't see your machine, but this is the one symptom where I'd rather you spent a service fee than kept going.
• A pop-up warning about a “hardware error” with a phone number to call is a scam. Apple doesn't put phone numbers in pop-up warnings. Close the window and call nobody.
• Nobody needs remote access to your Mac to fix a keyboard. A keyboard problem cannot be repaired from another state. And Macs don't use downloaded “keyboard drivers” or “trackpad drivers” — those downloads are the problem, not the fix.
• Old advice to skip: “reset the SMC” and “reset the PRAM/NVRAM” belong to older Intel Macs. On an Apple silicon Mac a normal restart is the modern equivalent — and an article still recommending them is too old to trust for the rest, either.

What's in the 27-page PDF

• The four causes behind almost every dead keyboard or trackpad
• The whole guide in six checkboxes — plus the one mistake worth avoiding
• How to keep driving the Mac when half of it is dead: Keyboard Viewer, Spotlight, and the cheap wired spare
• The five-minute first pass, in the order I actually work through it
• Batteries, switches and cables — where the switch hides on every Apple accessory
• Forget & re-pair, step by step, and exactly what Forget does and doesn't erase
• Cleaning it properly: Apple's lint-free-cloth rules and the 75-degree compressed-air method
• Sticky keys, mushy keys, and the Caps Lock delay that fools everyone
• Keys typing the wrong characters — keyboard layouts and the Input menu
• Slow Keys, Sticky Keys, Mouse Keys and Full Keyboard Access — and how to undo them
• Trackpad settings that look like faults, and what to do about a wandering pointer
• Safe mode, Apple Diagnostics, spills and swelling, a symptom-finder table, the scams, Q&A, glossary and a fill-in cheat sheet

Why I wrote this

Keyboard and trackpad calls are some of the shortest visits I make, and that bothers me — because the fix is usually a charge, a switch, or a setting somebody turned on by accident. Nobody should buy a new keyboard because the old one needed ten minutes on a cable, and nobody should feel foolish for not knowing where Mouse Keys lives. I write these guides as printable handouts so they can live in the drawer beside the Mac, and if you'd rather hand the whole thing off, that's a flat $99 visit with a 30-day follow-up included. — Bill