A friend of mine has been away from the Mac for a long time (living on an iPad), just bought a new MacBook Pro.

As he went to wipe down his keyboard, he discovered that pressing a key or the trackpad woke his computer. With his Apple Watch set to unlock his computer, he found himself wipe-typing, not something he wanted. He asked for the best way to disable this behavior.

In the old days, you could shut down your Mac, do your wiping, carefully avoiding the power on button. But with the introduction of the 2018 models, Apple made a change to both MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, so they turn on when you touch any key or the trackpad.

You can read all about that behavior in this technical note.

I brought this up on Twitter yesterday, got a number of suggestions (along with some expressions of frustration at this change).

My favorite idea is to select Lock Screen from the Apple menu. This puts you in the lock screen, but will not use your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac. So wipe away, just don’t wipe-type your password and you’ll be fine.

Another approach is this tool, which uses a specific keypress to lock your keyboard so you can clean your keyboard and screen. Type the key, clean away, then type the key again to unlock.

Happy cleaning.