What Was Happening
The enquiry from a Putney SW15 owner was, on the face of it, a simple one: a quote for a new keyboard. The MacBook Pro’s keyboard had stopped working and they wanted to know the cost before deciding whether it was worth bothering with.
Then came the second sentence, which is usually the one that matters. The machine was also running slowly.
That pairing is worth noticing. When somebody leads with one fault and mentions the second as an afterthought, they have usually already decided the slowness is just what old computers do. Frequently it isn’t — and it’s often the more fixable of the two.
By the time the machine reached the bench there was a third symptom recorded against it: at some point it hadn’t been turning on at all. Three complaints on one laptop, of wildly different weights, and the order we investigated them in decided whether the owner got a sensible quote or a frightening one.
Sound like your problem?
Bring it to our Putney workshop or message us a photo and we will give you a straight answer and a quote before any work starts.
Our Diagnosis
We took the power problem first, because it was the only one capable of making the other two irrelevant. There is no sense quoting for a keyboard on a machine that might not be worth repairing at all.
Connected to one of our own chargers, it powered straight up and ran normally — repeatedly, from cold, with no trace of the fault described.
That result is useful and slightly awkward. It shows the laptop’s own power path — board, charging circuitry, battery connection — working properly when fed from a known-good supply, and points hard at the owner’s charger as the thing that had failed. What it cannot do is prove it, because the fault never appeared in front of us to be reproduced. A no-power complaint that vanishes the moment you change the adapter is very probably the adapter, and “very probably” is the phrase we used.
With power set aside, the keyboard. Keys that don’t respond are not automatically a dead keyboard: accessibility options, a layout change, one stuck key holding the rest hostage, or debris under the mechanism all produce something a customer cannot tell apart from hardware failure. Those checks cost nothing and occasionally save an expensive part, so they come first. None of them accounted for this one.
The slowness was the third question, and on a MacBook Pro of this vintage it nearly always has one answer: the machine was still running a mechanical hard drive. Every other component got faster across the years it was in service. That one didn’t. When the software on top keeps growing heavier while the drive stays exactly as quick as the day it left the factory, you get a computer that feels broken without anything having broken.
How We Fixed It
The keyboard was replaced. On MacBook Pro models of this generation that is not the modest job the description suggests: the keyboard is fixed into the upper case as part of that assembly rather than sitting in it as a removable component, so fitting a new one means taking the machine apart and rebuilding it around the replacement. That is precisely why we make certain the keyboard is the fault before starting rather than discovering otherwise afterwards.
The tired hard drive was replaced during the same visit — the sensible sequencing when a machine is already open, since splitting the two jobs would have meant paying for the same strip-down twice.
We should be straight about the difference in certainty between those two pieces of work. The keyboard was a proven hardware failure, established by ruling out everything cheaper first. The drive was a judgement call: on a laptop of that age a mechanical drive that has become slow is usually tired rather than dead, and tired doesn’t announce itself with the clean pass-or-fail a properly failed component gives you. We replaced it because the symptom, the machine’s age and the drive type all pointed the same direction, and because leaving the original in would have meant handing back a laptop with a new keyboard that still felt wrong to use.
Power was verified on our own charger before the machine went back, and the owner left knowing their adapter was the prime suspect and needed replacing rather than being assumed innocent.
The Result
The MacBook Pro went home with a working keyboard, a fresh drive underneath it and a machine that responded the way it should.
The keyboard replacement carries our standard 90-day warranty, covering the part and the workmanship. It does not cover accidental damage — a warranty stands behind a repair that didn’t hold, not a later spill or a knock — and we would rather say that at handover than bury it somewhere.
Two things we could not guarantee, and said so. The first was the charger: proven fine on ours, not proven faulty on theirs. If the machine ever refuses to start again on a known-good adapter, the charging circuitry on the board is the next place to look. The second was age. A keyboard and a drive don’t reset the clock on everything else — the battery, the fans and the internal cabling are all running on the same years, and an owner is better off spending with that in mind than finding it out three months later.
Why This Happens
Three separate faults on one machine sounds like bad luck. Usually it’s just age arriving all at once.
Keyboards fail from use: millions of presses, dust and skin oil working past the keycaps, and often the ghost of a spill from years earlier that never quite killed the machine but left contacts quietly corroding. The failure tends to be gradual and then total — one key, then a row, then nothing.
Mechanical hard drives behave differently. More often than not they don’t fail at all; they simply stop being fast enough. A spinning drive spends its working life physically moving a head into position, and as it ages and starts retrying marginal areas of the platter, that wait stretches out. Nothing reports an error — the machine just pauses more, and the owner concludes it’s finished. If the same laptop came in now, the drive we’d fit would be solid-state, and on a machine of that era that single change does more for how it feels than anything else.
Chargers generate a disproportionate share of “my laptop is dead” calls. Apple’s adapters have a hard life: coiled tightly, pulled from the wall by the cable, flexed at the same two points thousands of times. The strain relief where the lead leaves the brick and the connector at the laptop end are where they give way. From outside, a dead laptop and a dead charger look identical — which is why substituting a known-good adapter is the first test worth doing and the only one that costs nothing.
Three Faults, One Machine — Deciding What’s Worth Doing
When a laptop arrives carrying several problems, the useful question isn’t whether it can be fixed. Nearly everything can be fixed. The question is what fixing it buys you. We work that out before quoting rather than after, which is why a diagnostic fee applies to the investigation and is absorbed into the cost of the work if the repair goes ahead — nobody pays twice for us to establish what’s wrong.
The arithmetic on an older MacBook Pro is honest and occasionally unwelcome. A keyboard replacement on a model where the keyboard forms part of the upper case is not a cheap repair, and adding a drive to it makes it less cheap again. There is a point at which the total starts approaching what the machine is actually worth, and when a job crosses that line we say so and let the owner decide. Plenty of people go ahead anyway, and reasonably — a machine you know, set up the way you like it, is worth more to you than its resale value suggests. But that ought to be a decision made in advance, not a surprise at collection.
One thing worth separating out. If a drive is being replaced because it is failing rather than merely slow, getting the data off it is a distinct job with its own odds and should be quoted separately. We only charge for data recovery if it succeeds — if your files don’t come back, you don’t pay for the attempt. Nobody can promise a recovery before looking at the drive.
Local Help in Putney SW15
If your MacBook’s keyboard has gone quiet, or the machine has slowed to the point where you’ve started browsing replacements, it’s worth having it looked at before writing it off. Often enough the expensive-sounding symptom turns out to be the cheaper fix, and the one you’d resigned yourself to is the one that would have made the real difference.
The workshop on Lower Richmond Road is our home base, so Putney drop-ins are straightforward and no appointment is needed. Bring the charger with you if you can — on any no-power complaint it’s the first thing we test, and having yours to hand often settles the question in minutes.
Call 020 7610 0500, drop the machine in, or use the contact form. There’s more on what we cover locally on our IT support in Putney page.
