Tonight I Successfully Replaced My MacbookAir Keyboard

For quite a while my } / ] key hasn't been working. As a programmer, I use } and ] a lot, so it's been quite frustrating. I used a macro to generate those values when I needed them or I'd copy and paste from other places. I put up with it for much longer than I should have and finally took care of it tonight. Actually, the straw that broke the camel's back was when my R key started popping out over and over again. :)

It was quite a process that took me well over an hour.

The original keyboard is riveted in while the replacement has the tiniest screws I've ever seen (and oh so many of them). It was quite a task.

Unfortunately, I didn't pull one of the speaker wires correctly and broke it. This appears to be the only casualty of my keyboard swap operation. Not sure if I can get a new one online, but I'll be hunting around later.

This is the best little toolset out there if you have a Mac. I highly recommend it. I burrowed a neighbor's set twice before I finally just bought my own.

Just like I did with the battery, I found a couple YouTube videos online walking through how to replace the keyboard, and I went for it. After breaking the speaker cable, I was pretty nervous and thought my computer might never turn on again. My Monday would be spent trying to get it repaired or worse, buying a new machine. Thankfully those worries were put to rest, and it's up and running. Still though, if I had to do it again, I'd probably take it the professionals. This stuff is hard, and I very easily could have really screwed it up.

Anyway, that's what I was up to tonight. Felt like sharing because it was quite an accomplishment for me.

Have you ever taken apart a MacbookAir? Do you work on your own computers or take them somewhere?

Edit: Next time, if I had to do it myself, I'd use ifixit instead of YouTube. Much easier to understand.

All told, it only cost me $31.51 and that includes a new set of tools. :)

Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, voluntaryist, and blockchain enthusiast. He wants to help create a world we all want to live in.

That's my only complaint about Apple products. They really don't make it so users can service it themselves very easily. :(

What was the total cost for this diy project?

Great question!

I'll edit the post with the answer. :)

Updated. $31.51 which includes a new toolset. :)

Wow! DIY saves the day.

I have a 2009 iMac to repair here soon, not looking forward to it. Apple has some of the best engineers and they are not messing around.

I have a 2008 MacBook Pro. I can't speak for the iMacs but the older MacBook Pros are far more easily worked on than the newer ones.

2009 is an old one... good luck!

This is one of the reasons I dislike Apple products in general. They are so maintenance unfriendly.

I hear a lot of (valid, to be sure) concerns about planned obsolescence and how things are being made just to be thrown away and replaced. There's also a counter argument that some new technologies are so much more efficient and effective that it's actually wasteful to continue using older models after a certain point. It's a tricky thing to get right, to be sure.

Depends on what you are using it for I suppose. But if I have a 8 year old laptop and it does what I need it to do, I don't believe it is more "efficient" to toss it and buy a new one. It certainly isn't more efficient for my finances. I guess all I can do as a consumer is vote with my wallet. The reason the last phone I bought is a Note 4 instead of a Note 5 (the newest available then) or iPhone is because it is easy to replace the battery and expand the storage. The reason I won't buy a Macbook Pro whenever I get my next laptop is because there is virtually 0 maintenance you can do on them. One thing I've always liked about Dell is the fact that service manuals and parts are readily available for their laptops and they are relatively easy to work on (unless that has changed in the last year or two). It seems to me that Apple has adopted what bargain basement PC laptops have been doing for a while now with they way they solder in the RAM and everything else.

I realize that doing this makes them cheaper to produce and it makes them able to be slightly lighter and thinner but I don't care about those extra few ounces and 1/8th of an inch as much as I care about being able to expand the RAM at a later date or fix something when it breaks.

My Solid State Drive just failed in November. I decided to have it repaired with a new Terabyte drive. I probably could have done it myself, it looked easy enough on Youtube, but the professionals did the job in one afternoon while I had lunch. Unfortunately, I lost a number of files. That's the worst!
Good job with your repair!

Thanks Terry. I made sure to have an updated time machine backup before starting. :)

I guess I am replacing my macs faster than I need to fix anything ^^ I have therefore not yet experienced anything like that (only breaking the chargers one in a while so far).

Yeah, I've replaced at least a few charger cables. :)

Those are so weak... and so expensive... definitely one weakness of mac, IMO.