As soon as my ‘unibody’ (late 2008) Macbook turned up (I’ll be using this until the new iMac’s come out) I was sure there was a fault. When I tapped the CAPS LOCK key the light didn’t come on. As I bashed the key on/off repetitively it would illuminate about 1 out of 20 presses. Balls! The key even felt slightly different to the others so I knew it was hardware related.

Cue a call to Apple support who made me jump through all the usual hoops (booting up in OSX safe mode etc) before confirming that it was a hardware problem and it would need repairing. This wasn’t an option I was about to entertain on a brand new MacBook so opted to have another MacBook delivered.

What do you know – this one is exactly the same! Caps lock only comes on 1 out of about 20 presses.

It seems the replacement MacBook also had the hard drive retention screw put in by Thor. I had a major panic trying to get it out without rounding the screw (jewellers screw driver and a weight on top whilst slowly turning eventually eased it out).

So, back on topic – what the hell is going on with the CAPS LOCK key? After much sifting of Apple’s support forums it turns out that the CAPS LOCK key has an undocumented feature: tap the key and it doesn’t activate (allegedly to reduce the chance of an accidental button press) but press the CAPS LOCK key for just a fraction of a second longer and what do you know – works every time. I thought it was a wind up when I read it, but if you have stumbled across this post because you think the CAPS LOCK on your MacBook is faulty – it probably isn’t! Someone just needs to tell the Apple support staff that.