This MacBook Air came in from Kirkliston on a Friday afternoon in August, booked in for a diagnostic. That meant the first job was getting it open and having a proper look round inside.
Once the bottom case was off, we found liquid on the trackpad and more of it inside the laptop. With the trackpad lifted out and turned over on the bench, you could see where it had got to. Clear beads were sitting on the metal frame, a little pool had gathered round the screw mounts, and there were shiny wet patches between the chips on the trackpad’s own circuit board.
It’s an easy spot for a spill to end up. The trackpad sits in its own cut-out at the front of the case, right between your wrists, and liquid that lands there can creep in round the edges and settle underneath, well out of sight.
The pad itself is cleverer than it looks, too. On a MacBook Air like this one it doesn’t physically click at all. It senses how hard you’re pressing, and a small motor, the copper coils you can see in the photos, gives a quick tap that your finger reads as a click. It all sits on the back of the pad, right where the liquid was.
Liquid sitting on a board is bad enough. Add power and it gets a lot worse. Current flows through the wet patches between bits that were never meant to be joined, and over time that eats away at the metal and leaves a crusty green deposit behind. Once corrosion has its teeth into a board, cleaning can’t undo the damage, and you’re into new parts or a board repair.
On this one, stripping it down and cleaning it was the whole repair, and there were no parts on the bill. Spill damage doesn’t always show itself straight away, though, so a quick test afterwards wouldn’t have told us much. A long run is a far better test. This one ran for over 12 hours, right through the night, without a single problem. It was ready on the Saturday morning and went home just after midday.
If you knock a cuppa over your MacBook, switch it off straight away and pull the charger out. Don’t power it back up to see if it’s survived, because power through wet parts is what makes things worse, and forget the bag of rice, it can’t reach anything that matters. Stand it upside down with the lid open, then bring it in and we’ll take a look.
Need the same repair? See our full MacBook Liquid Damage Repair Dundee | Repair Alliance service for pricing and what's covered.
