# Mac keyboard mystery

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mac-keyboard-mystery/552522
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [September 3, 2010, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mac-keyboard-mystery/552522 "2010-09-03T19:33:22Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)
#### Post date: [September 3, 2010, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mac-keyboard-mystery/552522/1 "2010-09-03T19:33:22Z")

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A while back, the right-hand Control key on my iMac’s keyboard stopped working. (It’s a regular generic Windows keyboard, so to make it more accessible to other people, I’d mapped the Control keys to the Command function so they wouldn;t forever be asking why CTRL-C, etc doesn’t work.)

I thought it was just a cheap keyboard going bad and thought little of it until the spacebar died. That’s harder to ignore, so I replaced the keyboard with a spare from the closet.

Mac takes me through the usual “What kind of keyboard is this?” check and amazingly, the right-hand Control key still doesn’t work. The left-hand key does work as expected.

I searched through Keyboard Preferences and could not find anything for mapping only one of any of the paired keys (eg: Shift, Control, Alt, etc.) What the heck may be going on that the left key works but the right key does not?