Most keystrokes on my Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard are ignored
I am trying to get a Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard to work with my MacBook Pro and while I found a couple of posts on similar issues, none of the suggested solutions worked for me, so I am posting this, hoping someone has a fresh suggestion:
Problem
My keyboard is skipping a lot of keys. I.e. some of the keystrokes do not appear in my editor/browser. Also moving the complementary mouse (connected to the same dongle) makes very sluggish moves on screen. It affects all keys. Occasionally, it starts working well for a couple of minutes and lagging usually starts when switching apps e.g. if I switch from OneNote to Firefox.
Setup
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports) macOS 10.15.7
- Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Mouse & Keyboard. They are wireless and connect to a Microsoft® 2.4GHz Transceiver v9.0
- To connect the transceiver I use a 4x USB 2.0 to USB-C hub.
- An additional wired mouse plugged into the hub
Troubleshooting so far
Following other posts, I tried the following on my mac:
- turning it off and on again
- turning bluetooth off on the macbook
- disable handoff for icloud devices
- disable slow keys and sticky keys.
- use different usb ports (both usb c ports on the mac and usb ports on the hub
- run
sudo fs_usage | grep -v 0.00to see if there is any kernel throttling happening. - disabled mouse keys
To rule out any issues with the usb dongle/hub or wireless signal jamming, I plugged the usb dongle into my Huwai MateBook (running Ubuntu), while I kept the MacBook running next to it. The keyboard works perfectly well on the other laptop.
Solution 1:
Same issue here, across a range of MacBooks (2017, 2020, 2021). The keyboard would intermittently skip keystrokes when the keyboard USB transceiver is connected via a USB hub (e.g. anker premium usb-c hub, choetech 7-in-1 usb-c hub).
It's not a complete solution, but the problem does not occur when the keyboard transceiver is connected directly to the MacBook (on older models pre usb-c), or via the official simple Apple usb-c to usb adapter, model A1632 (I have not tested the AV multiport one): https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJ1M2AM/A/usb-c-to-usb-adapter