My Macbook Pro Retina's USB port on the right side not working at all

Mountain lion MBPr15: right USB port is unreliable in that some USB sticks will not mount at all but others and other types of devices seem ok.

Not sure if I can take it in due to the time the whole repair might take and unlikely success.

Is there any USB diagnostic tool that we can use to report on what is happening when the ports are activated.

Like lsusb or something?

Will

The USB on the right side on mine was completely dead. Took it to the Apple Store and they fixed it in less than 24 hours. According to them, the right side ports are a separate board. From the receipt, it does not look like they replaced it, so it might have been a loose connection.

Just to add to the info-chain, I have problems with a newish MBPr with 10.8.3.

All kinds of weirdness is coming from the right USB port, with partitions getting (semi) dismounted, the Finder crashing as I try to remount, forcing a hard re-start, sometimes with furthr boot problems. Also, sometimes bootable partitions cannot be seen, even recovery ones. CCC has been grumbling at updating its own images, and multi-track audio streaming perfromance is very poor.

To be fair, I have not yet fully left-right tested everything, but as soon as I found this thread and became suspicious of the right, things seem a bit better running from the left...

Hi Justin, I continue to have issues with my right USB port as well on my 2012 Retina Macbook. There are times when it works great and other times it will start disconneting my usb drives and card reader at random. I have found one person on here that had a logic board replaced and claimed their USB issues was resolved because of it. However I'm not 100% certain that it is hardware related and that person who had their logic board replaced may very well still have issues at it can appear to be fine at times. This USB ejecting issue has been an ongoing problem with other Macs even before mountain lion.

Hi Eosman,

Yes, one thing to note though, is that Google is not full of people having this sort of trouble. Sure there are a few of us, but in the greater scheme of things compared to say, the ML Mail bugs, not that many.

It is interesting that a few a have been resolved by firmware updates. I wonder if perhaps the matter might persist for some of us who have not had these offered by the manufacturer, although they will of course say that more modern designs are immune to the problem and so do not need them. I might also say that the drive I am having current problems with is a LaCie d2 Quadra v3C, and it was starting to get grief from this after also having issues on two others that made me think port...

It certainly is frustrating. I will say that with my USB3 passport Western Digital drive has gotten some what better since a firmware update. Prior to it I really bad reliabilty on the right port on my retina macbook pro.

What I find confusing is that I had no issues with the left port even prior to the firmware update for my usb3 drive but the right port seems to be a little more reliable since then.

I have read online here that the USB port on the right closes to the screen shares connectivity with the bluetooth, keyboard, trackpad and facetime camera. There were issues with I believe the 2010 Macbooks and their USB2 port closes to the screen where it was unreliable with data heavy or power heavy devices. M-Audio even mentioned not to use that port with any of their devices.

This issues is not only a problem on the Mac but also PC based notebooks with USB 3 ports. There are numerous people out there having issues with their drives disconnecting in a similar fashion on Windows.

One guy goes onto to say here at the notebookreview forum that Intel's USB ports have been buggy since Ivy bridge and that if google it you can find many posts on the issue.

I just wish there was one answer for the problem but seems to be all over place. There have been OS updates, firmware updates, people swapping cables, drives. I found another fellow on here that had gone through numerous cables, drives, reinstall the OS, and even getting a new Macbook Pro yet still had issues with his usb port being unreliable. Eventually he just went with a NAS setup.

I will say my right USB port works flawlessly though with my external desktop USB2 Lacie drive that has its only AC power supply. I have backed up numerous times to it without a hitch.

I think it is the port like you say but I believe its a combination of firmware, OS drivers and the device it self. I will certainly be watching these forums on the issue to see if there is any progress on the matter.

So I installed Windows 7 via Bootcamp and my RIGHT usb port drops/ejects my WD passport external drive. My conclusion is that the RIGHT usb port shares the bus with the facetime camera, bluetooth and keyboard/trackpad and doesn't have enough power for external hard drives or card readers.

I'm not sure if Bootcamp is completely separate from OSX in terms of drivers for the USB. If it is separate and everything is being controlled by windows by windows only drivers then my issue is certainly hardware related.

However my RIGHT usb port as mentioned is fine with anything that has its own separate power supply or uses less power than a 2.5" external drive like a usb thumb drive. There was some one on these forums that mentioned he had his I/O board replaced for his right usb port and that did not fix this problem. This reinforces the fact the right USB port on the retina macbook pro doesn't deliever enough power.

Interesting.

There must be someone out there who can measure power delivery of each port!

The problems I mentioned above have only been for HDDs with their own power supply, so this is not the issue for me however...

So I have made some head way regarding this odd problem. Turns out my memory card reader is fine I think. My memory card reader will eject on the right port using a 4GB Lexar 133X professional CF card but NOT on the left USB port. However ALL 3 of my sandisk CF cards work fine in the reader on both USB ports. These 3 cards range from all different speeds from 15MB/sex to 30MB/sec. My lexar is 20MB/sec rated. Go figure!?

As for the Western Digital My passport USB 3.0 drive I have come to the conclusion its the drive and not the port. Reading through various forums on Anandtech, Apple Support and the Western Digital website forum many people have had issues with these drives on USB 3 ports on both Windows and on the Mac.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2302617

http://community.wd.com/t5/External-Drives-for-PC/My-Passport-2TB-USB-3-0-keeps- randomly-disconnecting-HELP/td-p/477224

Picked up a Seagate 1TB USB3 portable drive yesterday and its working like a charm on both ports no problem. I have stopped using my Lexar 4GB card too. So no more USB3 issues. Also my Lexar 64gb USB3 thumb drive works flawlessly transfering large files on both ports too.

My RHS USB port on Macbook Pro Retina has started to not recognise the USB superdrive. I have other USB devices that work ok - WD and Seagate disks connect no problem. With the Superdrive, it clicks when plugging in, but that's it...the drive won't accept disks as if there isn't sufficient current.

This is an intermittent problem.

I was wary that recently installed software might be to blame, so did a full restore of the previous week's time machine backup. Suddenly the Superdrive started to work in the RH port again, but after an hour or two it stopped.

Between it working and not, I had updated java, which seemed an unlikely cause, so I restored from the same backup again. After this restore, the Superdrive was not working again.

I have tried resetting the PRAM and SMC, but neither had any effect.

The Superdrive works fine in the LH port, and it definitely has worked in the RH port in the past.

Although there have been several posts about disks not working in the RH port, I haven't found anyone reporting the issue I am seeing. I am hoping someone has...and might know the solution?

I have now restored back to my original backup, before installing any s/w, and Superdrive still not working in front RH USB port.

I'm leaving it as is now, and have a session booked in at the Genius Bar next week.

The MacBook misbehaved perfectly at the Genius Bar, and wouldn't allow any SuperDrive to connect on the RH port. So it's now been sent off for IO board replacement.

After Apple replaced the IO board and flex cable, the SuperDrive worked in the RH port like a dream. For a few hours anyway. Doesn't work anymore though. Great hardware, I'm really impressed.

Thanks Altsaint for keeping us posted. I had some issues with some compact flash cards on my USB card reader and the Right USB port on my retina macbook pro. Some cards would get ejected at random. However since Apple released the newest wifi/aiport update for the macbook pro the problem seems to have gone away. I do know the USB on the right is on the same bus as the wifi, bluetooth and trackpad. So maybe the update did help..