Have a macbook air 11 inch (from mid 2013) that will only power on if the magsafe adapter is plugged in. After it is running, the magsafe can be removed, and it works fine. Power button will turn it off/on as it should. But if it is powered down and not plugged it, it does not respond to the power button at all. Plugging in the magsafe triggers a power on, as well. I’ve reset the SMC and the PRAM, which has not helped.
I initially thought I was going to have to swap out the keyboard (it had water spilled on it) but the keyboard seems to be working fine. This power issue, however, is perplexing. Does anybody have any idea what it might be?
After some more testing/troubleshooting, it seems that if the battery is plugged in at all, the machine doesn’t want to power up. If I disconnect the battery from the logic board and use only wall power, it works just fine.
It sounds like either a bad battery and/or a fried logic board. The easiest thing to do would be to test with another battery that you know works. If it still doesn’t turn on, you will need to open up the machine and check whether the charging chip on the board has been fried or not. BTW, just because the keyboard is working doesn’t mean you don’t need to replace it. The power button is integrated into the keyboard and if it’s connection to the logic board has been damaged, you’ll need to get a new one.
The good news is that SMC is able to get powered. Now, it’s just a matter of figuring out where the power block is occurring.
I pulled the power and let it run on battery last night to about 90%, then plugged it back in and charged it back up to 100%. So charging works at least- does that mean that the charging chip is less likely to be shot?
And I might be making a huge assumption on the power button, I assume it has only two states (on/off), and those seem to register just fine, as long as the power is connected, so I’m thinking that somewhere between the battery and the rest of the logic board there is a problem.
I pulled out the logic board last night, and there is visibly no corrosion/damage. However, when water was spilled on this one, the owner put it in a bag of short-grain rice, and when I opened the case yesterday the entire logic board enclosure was filled with rice. It it possible that the rice could have bridged a few points here and there and fried some circuits?
If the battery is recharging, that would mean charging chip is working, even if intermittently. I would still test with a clean battery to make sure that the contacts and circuits on the old battery are not at fault. If the clean battery shows the same symptoms, you now know that the problem is somewhere on the board. Also, I would cycle the battery by running the mac on DC until zero, physically remove it from the device, reinsert, recharge to full and see if that has any effect.
Rice is never a good idea for wet electronics. In a best case scenario, it will have zero effect. As for finding loose rice in your within your board, it’s a crapshoot. Anything from heat build-up, to rice dust coating, or wet rice acting as a conductor may have fried some important circuitry related to the battery. No one will be able to say for sure until the board is checked and tested, and I don’t mean visually.
Here’s to hoping that it’s just a case of a bad battery.