Can my Macbook Air be saved?

October 6, 2015 4:39 PM

Macbook vs coffee. Can it be saved?

Last night, I spilled a little bit of coffee on my year-old Macbook air. I mopped it up, turned it upside dow and left it alone for awhile. My partner got home about three hours later and it would not turn out. He went at it with a hair driver, turned it upside down again and left it overnight.

This morning, it booted up with an alarming loud fan sort of noise and was working, although it would not detect the power charger. I turned it upside down and left it all day.

Same situation when I got home. I took the stickier-seeming keys off, cleaned them and put he keyboard back together. I rebooted, and it is still making that fan noise, ad it still says the battery is not charging, but the indicator is showing it is plugged in and seems to be operating, albeit with that fan noise.

So, how alarmed should I be? I only use the Macbook for internet goofing around (which i can do on other devices), to convert eBooks for my Kindle, and for one specific work task. If the fan noise is nothing to worry about and the battery is fried, but the Macbook will be otherwise fine as long as I leave it plugged in, I am okay with that and will do nothing. If the fan noise means something is direly amiss, i will cough up and pay for this very expensive lesson.

So, which is it?

a) I will need to leave it plugged in, but it will be usable if I do
b) It's fried, and I need to take it in
c) other, please explain

Thanks in advance for any help!

posted by JoannaC to Technology (7 answers total)

I spilled an entire glass of red wine on my Macbook Air one time; it powered down immediately. I followed the sage advice of the internet, placing that sucker in a trash bag of rice with the most affected part facing down to drain out the liquid. There was a hair dryer involved. I waited 3 days before trying to power up again. It powered up beautifully. And it ran beautifully for 14 months.

And then it didn't register when it was plugged in, and the battery didn't charge, and when I took it to the Genius bar, they opened it up and confirmed that the wine had finally made it and eroded at its inevitable final destination.

I think you're screwed.
posted by pinkacademic at 4:43 PM on October 6, 2015

Or you could take it to your handy dandy mac repair person. I have the dubious distinction of spilling water and/or herbal tea on my expensive Macbook Pro not once, not twice, not 3x, but 4 -- yes, 4x -- in one year. Each and every time I took it in for repair, and was grateful to get it repaired at a cost of anywhere between $75 and $200 -- depending on the extent of damage. Once they had to do a bit of sneaky business inside my computer to erase all signs of water damage so that Apple would still honor my three-year Apple Care protection plan (no Apple won't repair if they see signs of water damage).
posted by zagyzebra at 4:54 PM on October 6, 2015

The bad news: when this happened to me, it was a logic board failure (an $800 courtesy of apple repair). The main symptom was it had to be plugged in or it was horrendously slow.

The good news: It lasted 3 years before the logic board completely died.
posted by Aranquis at 5:31 PM on October 6, 2015

My story here, happy ending.
posted by SLC Mom at 5:32 PM on October 6, 2015

I spilled an entire glass of water on my MacBook a few weeks ago. I turned it upside down for a few days and now it seems fine, but yeah, my understanding is that I've probably shortened its lifespan significantly. :\ I know people who've had a) happen to them, though.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 5:45 PM on October 6, 2015

Take it to the apple store, they will assess the damage for free and give you an estimate.

The fan noise(meaning the fan running at a constant high RPM because of a damaged/shorted sensor or fan controller) and charging issues make me think there was likely logic board damage. Friends of mine and clients have run machines like this for years, but they tend to get glitchier with time. I used one as my carry-around-in-bag-not-care-about machine to beat on and use for testing/nonimportant work stuff and just web browsing while i was on site for a while and it eventually got EXTREMELY hard to get it to boot up, but stable for about an hour each time it did... and then it would lock up again.

Another friend has a machine i'm about to rebuild, in which it worked relatively fine for about six months, then would only boot with pins on the logic board bridged(to force power on), and then just... stopped booting.

The snarky advice i usually give people is that a couple year old macbook air is so cheap now, that it's often a better deal to sell this machine as partially-working-but-damaged as is "for parts or repair" on ebay, and then buy a used cheap machine on craigslist. You'll probably only pay $2-300 for that exchange, and will skip a lot of the headache. Damaged macs are worth way more than you think they would be, or probably should be when you factor in the cost of parts.

To loop back around though, it's extremely unlikely this is a steady state thing and it will just "stay" this broken/damaged. It's extremely likely it will get worse due to slightly shorted/damaged components failing, corrosion, etc. Especially since due to the in-built battery power was applied the entire time.
posted by emptythought at 6:57 PM on October 6, 2015

It sounds like at least one electrical short has happened near the power supply connection, (if it can't see the power supply) Everything is on that main board in the Air, it's a spendy repair because of the cost of the part.

When something like this happens, you have to wick or blot all of the liquid away, use some canned air and wait up to 24 hours with the device in a bag of rice to help draw any remaining liquid out.

If you are really lucky and you let it sit a few days with no power and then fire it back up plugged in... I'd give it a 40% chance of chiming and booting.

As an added bonus, it will sell like coffee when it heats up.
posted by bobdow at 10:33 PM on October 6, 2015