MacBook repair outside warranty?

I bought an upgraded MacBook Pro for $4,500 in 2019. I purchased AppleCare for 3 years on it for an additional $600. That AppleCare expired on December 15th 2023 and one week ago my MacBook went to sleep and never woke up again. Took it to an authorized repair centre and they said the logic board is fried and will cost $1000ish to fix.


I am devastated. 2 months after my 3 year AppleCare expires and the laptop silently died. I don’t have the money to fix it, my family is not well off. I was only able to afford it in the first place because my mom sold her house and helped out with it. I am a small music producer and book writer and I lost over 100gb worth of music I had written, recorded for other people and the novel I had been writing for 14 years. (Worldbuilt for 12 of those years and only began writing it in 2019 on this Mac.)


Does Apple do good faith repairs if they die so close to the warranty expiration? Or am I able to procure the right tools to unsolder the SSD myself and retrieve my priceless data off of it?


I have learned my backup lesson already moving forward, but this is devastating to both my wallet and career.


Thank you.

MacBook Pro 16″

Posted on Mar 4, 2024 1:02 PM

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Mar 5, 2024 6:52 PM in response to dekuinkwell

Do not even attempt to touch the SSD chips on the Logic Board. The data on the SSD chips is hardware encrypted on the 2018+ Macs and requires the security enclave chip to be able to unlock the data on the SSD since the security enclave holds the encryption keys used to unlock the SSD & decrypt the data.


As @Mac Jim ID mentions, you will need to contact a professional data recovery service to see if they can retrieve your data. If the data is that important to you, then you will not want to mess with the Logic Board yourself as you will most likely destroy the data. You will likely only have one chance at recovering the data, so choose wisely.


Unfortunately I recently saw a video from a respected repair tech who performs Apple Logic Board repairs who mentioned that in the majority of cases the failure of these boards is due to a critical component on the Logic Board related to the SSD which destroys the SSD. Just hope your Logic Board failure is something other than a burned out SSD chip.


People should always have frequent and regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. The more important the data, the more backup copies a person should have. As you are finding out the hard way, there are a lot of new ways to permanently lose access to your data with these newer Macs due to all the hardware, software, and security changes. Apple includes the Time Machine backup software with every copy of macOS in order to make it easy for people to backup their Mac and external drives.


I wish you luck in recovering your data, but you should be prepared for the worst here since it is difficult to impossible to recover data from SSDs especially when the data is hardware encrypted.

Mar 5, 2024 1:47 PM in response to dekuinkwell

As with any warranty, the expiration dates are hard dates without exception. I have not heard of Apple doing any out of warranty repair unless it was for a recall.


As for recovering your data. There are data recovery companies that may be able to help, but unfortunately I am not able to recommend any. Finding a legitimate company may be difficult and will require a great amount of research as there are also many shady companies that will take your money without providing you the data you need. You may want to compare the cost of that service to the repair cost.


Doing it yourself may be possible, but I would not recommend that approach for data that you deem to be priceless. Others may be able to offer the steps needed to do this with a higher degree of certainty that I would not be able to provide.

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MacBook repair outside warranty?

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