Hi,

This is my first post about fixing things in real life so I’d appologise for all english mistakes I’m going to make. I don’t feel really confortable with DIY words in my non-native language 😉

Anyway, my sister texted me “my macbook won’t power up anymore”.  It’s an old Macbook 13″ she bought a couple of years ago so I said her “that’s probably the motherboard or some electronic stuff broken, bring it if you want but I won’t be able to do anything than saving your data by removing the internal hard drive…

But I’ve been able to do something, here is how.

Symptoms

The Mac won’t power up. When the power cord is plugged the LED is lit but it’s very low. You can hardly guess it’s up. The battery is discharged (one LED blinking when pushing the battery state button).

Sometime, when pressing the power connector, the LED comes up for one sec.

Cause

This “MagSafe” power adapter uses a specific connector with a magnet inside. The plug pins can go back inside the connector to adjust their own size (using a spring?).

After several years of plug in and plug out, the plug pins won’t go out enough anymore, and thus can’t touch their receiver on the Mac.

Fix it!

There’s nothing we can do for the pins to go out more, it’s probably springs which are tired… But we can use an engineering file to reduce the size of the rest of the connector, so it could go deeper inside the mac.

Well that’s pretty hard to explain, but with a picture, you should get it:

Beware to use the file on the edge only! If you do it on the complete connector, you’ll reduce the pins size as well and it’ll be useless!

You’ll probably need a vice, or a lots of patience. I suggest putting the connector wrapped in something to protect it in the vice.

It’s back to life !