Modifier Key Binding Resets on new TB-MBP

[dukee101]

There seems to be a strange keyboard bug on my new 15" Touch Bar MacBook Pro. In the "Modifier Keys" panel within System Preferences > Keyboard (image attached), I have my Caps Lock key set to "No Action" (i.e. I disable my caps lock key). But on my new MBP, this setting resets randomly after a few times I close and reopen the lid. All of a sudden the caps lock gets activated again.

This never happened on my old iMac nor my old MBP -- it would stay in place.

Has anyone experienced the same issue (or similar. i.e. different modifier keys resetting), and if so, have you found a solution?

 

[iphoneuserinyyz]

There seems to be a strange keyboard bug on my new 15" Touch Bar MacBook Pro. In the "Modifier Keys" panel within System Preferences > Keyboard (image attached), I have my Caps Lock key set to "No Action" (i.e. I disable my caps lock key). But on my new MBP, this setting resets randomly after a few times I close and reopen the lid. All of a sudden the caps lock gets activated again.

This never happened on my old iMac nor my old MBP -- it would stay in place.

Has anyone experienced the same issue (or similar. i.e. different modifier keys resetting), and if so, have you found a solution?

I am experiencing exactly the same behaviour. I tried calling Apple support about it and got nowhere. First, they seemed to have immense difficulty understanding what I was trying to describe, even after taking them step by step through System Preferences menus (the rep apparently had no clue that this preference was there). Their solution was to reinstall Sierra, which I did, to no avail. Then they wanted me to format the drive and install from scratch, which I declined to do (this is a computer needed for work and I don't have time to get everything back up and running, and besides, I am not confident it will solve the problem anyway). I kept asking them to pass along the feedback to a software person as a bug report, but they seemed to have no idea how to do this and insisted on following their script. I landed up ending the call pretty frustrated, and with no solution.

I have also noticed that extensions installed in Safari seem to disappear periodically and have to be reinstalled, and I am wondering if this is a related problem.

Any solutions would be welcome.

 

[dukee101]

Thanks for chiming in iphoneuserinyyz -- it's comforting to know I'm not alone in this. It's usually the case that lower-level tech support representatives are not equipped to handle more nuanced bugs like this, and I'd ask to move to a higher-level representative at some point.

That being said, I agree that a format wouldn't do anything to fix the problem, nor would a reinstall of Sierra. My belief is that this is a bug, perhaps tied to the introduction of new keyboard drivers for the Touch Bar (just a guess, but don't see what else would cause this type of odd bug).

Should we cross-post on the Apple Community boards too? How can we get their attention?

 

[iphoneuserinyyz]

I am wondering whether it might actually be a hardware issue. I have thought about setting up a genius bar appointment, but I am worried that that will be an exercise in frustration also.

 

[iphoneuserinyyz]

I decided to see if I could reproduce this behaviour on another computer. Sure enough, my 11" MBA is also doing the same thing! So I went ahead and wiped the drive of the MBA, and then reinstalled Sierra from the recovery partition (i.e. fresh download from Apple). And guess what? On the brand new install of Sierra on the MBA, the exact same behaviour occurs! To me, this strongly suggests a software issue, not a hardware issue.

 

[iphoneuserinyyz]

So I took this a step further and set up a genius bar appointment to show them. We were able to reproduce it on several computers, including the ones they had in store. So most definitely a Sierra problem, not a hardware problem. The genius sent in an official report to Apple engineers

 

[dukee101]

The genius sent in an official report to Apple engineers

That's a relief. Thank you for taking so much initiative on this! In the meanwhile, I wrote an AppleScript that automatically disables the Caps Lock key. I run it using Alfred. Here's the code:

tell application "System Preferences"
reveal anchor "keyboardTab" of pane "com.apple.preference.keyboard"
end tell
tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences"
click button 1 of tab group 1 of window 1
tell pop up button 2 of sheet 1 of window 1
click
pick menu item "No Action" of menu 1
end tell
tell button 3 of sheet 1 of window 1
click
end tell
end tell
quit application "System Preferences"​

The text editor here flattens the indents, but it should still work. Also, if you're going to run it in Alfred, you'll have to start with "on alfred_script(q)" and end with "end alfred_script"