You installed macOS Ventura or later with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, the Mac booted, and now the built-in keyboard and trackpad do nothing. External USB devices may also be dead. Nothing is broken, and you have not damaged the machine.
This is the single most alarming problem in OCLP, because the tool you need to fix it is on a Mac you can no longer type on. Here is what happened and how to get input back.
What causes it
Apple removed USB 1.1 driver support — the OHCI and UHCI controllers — from macOS entirely in Ventura. It has stayed removed in Sonoma and Sequoia.
On most modern hardware that would be harmless. On these older Macs it is not, because USB 1.1 is exactly what the internal input hardware hangs off. When those drivers vanish, you lose:
- The built-in keyboard and trackpad on laptops
- The infrared remote receiver
- Bluetooth, on many models — the Bluetooth chipset is itself a USB 1.1 device
OCLP restores all of it through root patches. The gap is the window before those patches are applied — during macOS setup, or immediately after a macOS update has wiped the patches. In that window the Mac genuinely has no working input.
Is your Mac affected?
Only these models rely on USB 1.1 for internal input. Check your model identifier with sysctl hardware.model in Terminal, or see our supported Macs list.
| Family | Affected | Identifiers | Exceptions |
|---|---|---|---|
| MacBook | Mid 2010 and older | MacBook5,1 – MacBook7,1 | — |
| MacBook Air | Late 2010 and older | MacBookAir2,1 – MacBookAir3,x | — |
| MacBook Pro | Mid 2010 and older | MacBookPro4,1 – MacBookPro7,x | Excludes Mid 2010 15″ and 17″ (MacBookPro6,x) |
| iMac | Late 2009 and older | iMac7,1 – iMac10,x | Excludes Core i5/i7 27″ Late 2009 (iMac11,1) |
| Mac mini | Mid 2011 and older | Macmini3,1 – Macmini5,x | — |
| Mac Pro | Mid 2010 and older | MacPro3,1 – MacPro5,1 | — |
If your Mac is not in this table and your keyboard has stopped working, the cause is something else — most likely missing root patches generally, covered further down.
The fix: a USB 2.0 or 3.0 hub
This is the part that sounds wrong but is genuinely the documented solution.
Plug a USB 2.0 or 3.0 hub into the Mac, then plug your keyboard and mouse into the hub — not directly into the Mac. The hub negotiates as a USB 2.0 device, which forces the EHCI controller into play instead of the missing UHCI one. Your peripherals then work through a driver macOS still ships.
Plugging the same keyboard directly into the Mac’s own port will not work. The hub is doing the actual work here.
- On laptops, you need an external keyboard and mouse as well. The built-in ones are wired to the internal USB 1.1 bus and cannot be routed through a hub.
- On Sonoma, not every hub works. The behaviour was weakened further in that release. If your hub does nothing, the documented advice is simply to try a different one — this is not a sign you have diagnosed it wrong.
With input restored, open OpenCore Legacy Patcher and run Post Install Root Patch. After the reboot, the internal keyboard and trackpad work again and the hub is no longer needed — until the next macOS update.
If you have no hub: fix it over SSH
If the patches were wiped by a Software Update rather than a fresh install, and you had the foresight to enable Remote Login beforehand, you can repatch from another computer without touching the Mac’s keyboard at all.
- From another machine, connect:
ssh user@ip - Run the patcher directly:
/Applications/OpenCore-Patcher.app/Contents/MacOS/OpenCore-Patcher --patch_sys_vol - Reboot:
sudo reboot
This only works if Remote Login was switched on in Sharing settings before the update. If you own one of the affected Macs, turning it on now is cheap insurance.
Mac Pro owners: a second, separate problem
The 2008–2010 Mac Pros (MacPro3,1 through MacPro5,1) have an additional USB fault that is unrelated to Ventura removing the drivers, and it affects Big Sur and newer.
On these machines the UHCI (USB 1.1) and EHCI (USB 2.0) controllers cannot both be active at once — whichever takes hardware ownership first wins. Later macOS releases handle this less reliably, so mice, keyboards and Bluetooth chipsets drop out intermittently rather than failing outright.
The fix is the same hub trick: put a USB 2.0 or 3.0 hub between your devices and the Mac Pro to force EHCI ownership. A cold start — full shutdown rather than restart — sometimes clears it too.
Preventing it next time
Every macOS update wipes root patches, so on an affected Mac this will recur at every update unless you plan for it.
- Keep a USB hub with the machine. The cheapest possible insurance.
- Enable Remote Login in System Settings › General › Sharing, so the SSH route is always available.
- Build your USB installer with OCLP and the correct target model selected. Done properly, the installer carries the autopatcher, which reapplies patches through the update automatically and avoids the dead-keyboard window entirely.
Related symptom: everything is slow and the Dock looks flat
If input works but the Mac feels dramatically slow, and the Dock and menu bar have lost their transparency and wallpaper tint, that is the classic signature of missing root patches after an update. Same cause, different visible symptom — open OCLP and run Post Install Root Patch.
Related troubleshooting
- Mac won’t boot after OpenCore Legacy Patcher — find your failure on the boot-stage map, including how to revert root patches from Recovery.
- macOS installer stuck or failing — frozen progress bars, greyed-out buttons and firmware update errors.
- Root patching errors — error code 71, version mismatch and helper tool failures.
Details on this page are compiled from the official Dortania troubleshooting documentation. We are an independent community resource and are not affiliated with Dortania or Apple. For the authoritative reference see the official documentation; if something here is out of date, let us know.