Q: iMessage on 2011 MBP not functional after new hard drive and logic board
I have a MacBook Pro (2011) and an iPhone 6, running the latest versions of El Capitan and iOS 9, respectively. These are my only apple devices and the only ones that show up in my AppleID devices list (which I assume is accurate since, in troubleshooting this problem, I recently changed my AppleID password and updated on both devices).
Recently, my MBP suddenly shut down. I took it in and was told the logic board and hard drive (HDD) needed to be replaced. After the repairs, I signed back into iCloud, made sure the OS was up-to-date, and tried to make sure all other settings were back to the way they were before the crash. But now Messages on my MBP no longer works. I've tried lots of things to troubleshoot this, but nothing has been successful.
When I open Messages, it seems to have a record of all the conversations I had at the time when the computer crashed. In fact, when I first opened messages, I didn't notice anything was wrong until I realized that the conversations weren't updating as I was iMessaging from my phone. I tried signing out and back in to iCloud on both devices (tried this multiple times), and I've made sure that all the same accounts are checked in Messages>Accounts>Settings on my MBP and Settings>Messages>Send & Receive on my iPhone. On my computer, all the contacts in the "To:" field of the chat window are colored red. When I click on the contact, in the drop down menu, in faded gray font, it shows the contact's phone number with a check mark and "iMessage" to the right. Below that is the same number, also in the faded gray font, but with the "+1" country code and the text, "is not registered with iMessage."
I would be thrilled if someone could explain to me how to fix this!
MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011), OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)
Posted on Jan 27, 2016 7:25 PM

