Intermittently unresponsive keyboard and trackpad on Macbook Air

Especially since the 10.8.3 update, I've been experiencing occasional freezes of my 2012 Macbook Air's trackpad and keyboard. The trackpad will be completely unresponsive, and usually only a few keystrokes will get through. Other people have complained that similar things happen after resuming from sleep, or that it takes a reboot to fix, but this happens randomly (it'll be working perfectly fine and then become unresponsive, then be fine 10 seconds later).

I have no external USB devices connected, and nothing shows up in the system log at the relevant times. In addition, as has been suggested by others online, I've disabled the Android File Transfer helper process which apparently has caused similar issues for others.

It's still under warranty -- should I take this to the Apple Store, or perhaps try reinstalling the OS first? Will that be their first line of attack anyway, or do you think they'll be able to diagnose a hardware problem and fix/replace it?

I would create a new user and see if the behavior happens under a new account, so you can isolate whether this is System Wide or just related to your own account. Check your Launch Items in system preferences and remove everything just to test.

How much free space do you have? For what is worth, I'm using a MBA 11' mid 2011 and I have the same behavior sometimes when Arq2 starts and I have IntelliJ + Xcode running. Like the CPU is under a lot of "pressure" and I totally experience the same. It lasts a few seconds (10 sometimes!).

So I doubt there's anything to do, unless this happens very often to you, in which case I'd take it to an Apple Store for either reinstall or some hardware check.

Resetting the MacBooks power controller solved this for me:

To reset the SMC:

1: Shut down the computer.

2: Plug in the MagSafe or USB-C power adapter to a power source and to your computer.

3: On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.

4: Release all the keys and the power button at the same time. (You will see the status light on your charger change back and forth when you do this).

Done: Press the power button to turn on the computer.

Why this fix makes sense/works:

You will notice that when this issue occurs if you close and reopen your MacBooks screen the issue solves itself for the moment, this is because doing so cycles the power. Aka why a full power reset as described above can solve the issue for good.

Ref: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201295

(Also relevant if issue is occurring on MacBook Pro, or standard MacBook)

Do you have a good deal of status bar icons/services? I found in my case, that one particular service had caused my trackpad/keyboard to be unresponsive(turned out to be the wifi service). Disabling it in the top menubar may help.

In the case of the other answer, about creating another user account, this would have a similar effect, as your various preferences are set to default, so there may not be a conflicting service/interface effect at play.