The other night I was catching up with my TV shows when I obsessed over cleaning my macbook pro’s keyboard. I took out each tile and accidentally poked the sensor of the right shift key, which caused it to appear stuck.

1. Macbook Air Shift Button Will Not Work
2. Shift Button Macbook Air Refurbished
3. Shift Button Macbook Air 11.6

Since I can’t use the laptop properly (it goes to safe mode, can’t type password), I googled for possible answers with this problem and none of them helped. Opening the laptop again goes straight to safe mode since the shift key is stuck. During this frustrating experience, I learned that pressing the space bar after turning the laptop on would skip the safe mode and head straight to the login. But it’s useless since I couldn’t enter the password correctly.

Movie maker apple mac. Skeleton

Macbook Air Shift Button Will Not Work

Two days later I bought an external keyboard and when I got home, I remembered that my laptop goes straight to my desktop when I turn it on. With further research, I learned that pressing ‘C’ after turning it on solved that problem. I didn’t have to enter the password. When it recognized the external keyboard, I was able to use the macbook properly but since I didn’t want to get stuck using it, I searched for a way to disable the shift key.

Shift Button Macbook Air Refurbished

Shift Button Macbook Air 11.6

I remembered a subject in college called “Computer Assembly” or something, it was a tough subject and I did not learn/understand anything but I do remember the professor trying to teach us how entering a very long code turns the caps lock on/off. So I searched for ways how to disable the shift key and found this.

Here’s what I did:

1. I downloaded KeyRemap4MacBook and installed it. Enter your password using the external keyboard. The laptop would restart.
2. Open System Preferences > Keyremap4MacBook, scroll down and look for the key that needs disabling. In my case it was Disable Shift_R.
3. Click ReloadXML and you’re good to go.

Kuzy - MacBook Keyboard Cover for Older Version MacBook Pro 13, 15, 17 inch and MacBook Air 13 inch, iMac Wireless Keyboard, Apple Computer Accessories Key Board Silicone Skin Protector - Black 4.2 out of 5 stars 10,483. Alt key on Mac is indeed exist. And it’s called Option key. Windows vs Mac—there are so many differences. A lot of our customers have used a PC before and then decide they want to switch to Mac for better performance, nicer design, or for better security. Use a combination of the functionalities of the Keyboard Viewer and KeyRemap4MacBook to figure out which shift key is the problem. In my case, I found out that it was only my left shift key. Disable the left/right shift key on KeyRemap4MacBook and click on the 'Reload XML' button to make that take effect.

It’s so easy! Be careful with what you’re going to edit or disable though, you don’t want to make it worse.

I could have avoided this if I only thought of searching YouTube first for tutorials in cleaning my keyboard. What is the best autotune software. But then again, I’m up for learning from my mistakes and learning the hard way so this was a good experience after all, even though I know I’d have to get this repaired some day.