MacBook Air comes back from the dead

[TFTC]

So last year my mid 2013 MacBook Air 11 died on me and Apple washed their hands off the problem (they claimed there was water damage which damaged the logic board / keyboard and trackpad) and gave me a R13k bill to fix the bill and I posted the story here on the forum. I just packed the MacBook away for a year making a mental note to post it for sale on Gumtree for spares but never got round to doing it. A friend of mine was always pestering me to take it to this 'IT guy' at the mall and eventually I agreed and took laptop with charger so that the guy can use it during the repair process. After plugging it in the thing switched on and booted up and everything was working fine. Took it home and everything continued working fine until I switched it off and for a week it refused to come on whether on charger or not. Then yesterday it came on again and its been working well since then and I am understandably reluctant to switch it off again. Now my question is if Apple was right and my logic board / keyboard / trackpad is kapput, what could have caused the laptop to come back to life, die then switch on again? Is it possible that I might be ruining the laptop more by continuing to use it when it is certified dead?

 

[surfs-up]

So last year my mid 2013 MacBook Air 11 died on me and Apple washed their hands off the problem (they claimed there was water damage which damaged the logic board / keyboard and trackpad) and gave me a R13k bill to fix the bill and I posted the story here on the forum. I just packed the MacBook away for a year making a mental note to post it for sale on Gumtree for spares but never got round to doing it. A friend of mine was always pestering me to take it to this 'IT guy' at the mall and eventually I agreed and took laptop with charger so that the guy can use it during the repair process. After plugging it in the thing switched on and booted up and everything was working fine. Took it home and everything continued working fine until I switched it off and for a week it refused to come on whether on charger or not. Then yesterday it came on again and its been working well since then and I am understandably reluctant to switch it off again. Now my question is if Apple was right and my logic board / keyboard / trackpad is kapput, what could have caused the laptop to come back to life, die then switch on again? Is it possible that I might be ruining the laptop more by continuing to use it when it is certified dead?

It is an intermittent issue. If I were you, I would remove the back cover, and loosen and reseat all ribbon cables and connections...particularly the screws that hold the boards to the frame, as these are grounding points for the DC circuitry. Pay particular attention to the logic board, because that is usually the suspect with a MBP not turning on, but while it is open retighten and reseat everything to make sure they have firm connections.


Close it up and run the Apple provided "first aid" app which you will find under disk utilities. Doing the first step will ensure you have done all you can to the hardware side, and running first aid will ensure you clean up the software side of the laptop. You can do all of this yourself, it will just cost you half an hour of your time.