Garbled Texts in iMessage on Mac

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Level 1

76 points

Garbled Texts in iMessage on Mac

Sometimes on my Mac when typing a text in iMessage, everything suddenly becomes garbled. Sentences out of order and such. Looks like it could be an auto-replace error related to punctuation because the result always includes a non-word with an apostrophe mixed in.

This had been happening on my iMac for a couple of years — infrequently, so I never took the initiative to seek a solution until now. Now though, it's happening on the MacBook Pro I recently bought. I had hoped the problem would go away when getting the new machine, but no.

I've gotten in the habit of typing longer text messages in TextEdit, then pasting them into iMessage to avoid the issue. It's a dumb, frustrating workaround, but it's what I've had to resort to.

I'm running Monterey currently, but have been having this problem on multiple machines, going back several OS versions. Always on my Mac, never on my iPhone or iPad.

MacBook Pro Apple Silicon

Posted on Sep 19, 2022 09:01 AM

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Answer 1

Lager1

Community Specialist

Sep 22, 2022 04:04 PM in response to bonn128

Hi bonn128,

Welcome to Apple Support Communities.

Even though you have experienced this in the past, let's see if we can find what might causing it on your MacBook Pro.

Have you tried testing this issue while booted up into safe mode or under a new user account? If not, this is the best place to start. Starting up your Mac in safe mode can help you determine whether issues you’re experiencing are caused by software that loads as your Mac starts up. A new user account will help us determine if there is a setting possibly causing the issue.

How to use safe mode on your Mac

"1.Shut down your Mac.
Turn on your Mac and continue to press and hold the power button until you see the startup options window.
Select your startup disk, then press and hold the Shift key while clicking “Continue in Safe Mode”.
Log in to your Mac. You may be asked to log in again."

If the issue is no longer occurring while in safe mode, restart your computer to startup normally, and see if the issue returns at that point. If it does, you'll want to test your login items using the steps in this guide:

Remove login items to resolve startup problems on your Mac

Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac

Delete a user or group on Mac (to remove the test account once completed)

We hope this helps.

Cheers!

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Answer 2

bonn128 Author

Level 1

76 points

Sep 22, 2022 04:24 PM in response to Lager1

Thanks for the reply. What makes this difficult is that it only happens from time-to-time. I haven't been able to isolate exactly what the circumstances are when it happens. So testing it in Safe Mode will be time-consuming. Good idea though. I'll give it a whirl.

Thinking more, I believe it's being caused be some sort of cut and paste issue. It almost always happens when I change the order of a paragraph by cutting part of a sentence then pasting it into another part of the message — like it freaks out auto-correct, which then eliminates words and plops in strange punctuation. I don't know.

Really, I was hoping it was a known issue with a simple fix. Alas, so such luck. I do appreciate your response and your help. Thanks again. I'll try Safe Mode at some point in the next week or too and reply with the outcome here, in case others are having this issue.

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Answer 3

K_Faith

Community Specialist

Sep 22, 2022 04:59 PM in response to bonn128

Great bonn128,

We look forward to hearing about how it went, and hope you have a great day.

Cheers!

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Garbled Texts in iMessage on Mac

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