Apple keyboards may look nice, but they do tend to highlight the dirt (most keyboards are pretty horrendous when it comes to hygiene but white and transparent plastic doesn’t really cover it up as well as beige or black) and after a few months of use, mine is looking pretty bad. It just got a whole load worse though when the CD-R pen that I was using (we used to call then OHP markers when I was younger!) leaked over the U, I and 9 keys. After removing the keys and spending about 30 minutes at the kitchen sink with washing up liquid and a scouring pad I’ve pretty much restored them to white (albeit with a faint trace of blue-black smudge) but if anyone has any tips for removing permanent ink from plastic then I’d be grateful to hear them.
In the meantime, Vincent McBurney has a tongue-in-cheek look at 10 tips for better keyboard hygiene.
It actually should come off with a pencil eraser.
If it is one of the pens I am thinking of, I have had great success removing ink like that with something like a white Staedtler eraser (I am sure any will work fine)
Thanks for the anonymous tip… I’ll give that a try.
BTW, I just found a great blog post on cleaning the Apple keyboard.