Spilled water on my MacBook Pro! Yikes! Please help!

Always have a back up so you can replace your user data / ect... encase of a catastrophic failure.

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Hi Nicoleapplepleasehelp and welcome to Apple Support Communities,

Whenever a liquid spill occurs the first thing that has to happen is the laptop should be shut down immediately. All power must be removed as soon as possible. It is especially important that the battery be disconnected and removed.

All affected parts must be removed from the laptop.

Then all affected parts would be washed in deionized water and blown dry with compressed air. (In a water spill the deionized water is probably not as critical. Depends on the mineral content of the water.) and blown dry with compressed air.This is especially true of the large chips on the logic board. Water can wick under them and cause havoc for weeks and months.

The logic board should be placed in a drying/dehumidifing oven for at least two days. Longer depending on the spill.

The keyboard is a separate matter as described below.

This is how these keyboards work:

This is the contactor array of a MacBook Pro 2011 13" . You're looking at it from back to front. Those round dots are where the silicone rubber "cones" cause the front array to make contact with the back array, telling the computer which key has been pushed. The width of these (I think deposited silver ) traces is about 0.5 mm.

Now you're only looking at the just the front array. You can see that the contact pads are connected in series. A break anywhere in the trace connecting them would cause the "downstream" keys to stop working.

So here you see a site where galvanic corrosion occurred. I know that this particular MBP was exposed to water. So I bought it very cheaply. I was able to clean and completely dry out the logic board and the MBP worked fine for a while but quickly the Q - W - E - R -T - Y - P keys got wonky then completely stopped working. I bought a replacement keyboard for cheap but then found out that it's held to the front frame with around 80 tiny screws. So I was using it with a BlueTooth keyboard. Recently I bit the bullet and for $69 bought an entire top case for my machine. Putting it in meant that the everything had to come out of and off the top case.

So you can see from the amount of corrosion, it doesn't take much to cause a failure. In this case a drop of liquid less than 0.5 mm would, over time with galvanic action, cause a failure weeks and months after the spill.

When I took this keyboard apart I was shocked to find how much crap was trapped under and inside the keyboard. Especially since I pride myself in never having any food/drink near my "precious!"

6 days ago my puppy knocked over a cup of flavored water on my macbook's keyboard (OSX 10.8.5) I didn't see it right away but the mac went from playing a movie to turning off as a frantically tried to dry it. I went to the store bought a 20 lb bag of rice and a large tuparware container that would shut with my mac in it.

I dumped the rice on an around the keyboard (submerging the macbook in rice) shut it the best i could and let it sit for 4days. On the 4th day it wouldn't turn on but I charged it anyways. I then left it alone till the 6th day and tried it again and it suddenly turned on! I hope that the next person that sees this has the same luck!

Nanehe,

Hopefully you've been lucky and you won't have any problems downstream.

"cup of flavored water"

Was there sugar in that water?

So I'm quoting from myself here:

" Whenever a liquid spill occurs the first thing that has to happen is, the laptop should be shut down immediately. All power must be removed as soon as possible. It is especially important that the battery be disconnected and removed."

There are components that exist on the logic board that if any water/liquid wicks into the sub mm gap where it attaches to the logic board and power is applied to the board that component will immediately fail. This will result in the logic board having to be replaced.

So hopefully you've been lucky.

spudnuty wrote:

I was able to clean and completely dry out the logic board and the MBP worked fine for a while but quickly the Q - W - E - R -T - Y - P keys got wonky then completely stopped working.

My crazy Ferret spilt water on my Retina keyboard (lesson learned...never keep liquid by laptops if you have ferrets running around) and let it dry out for a week. It worked fine but the only problem I had after turning it back on was the keys 6, Y, J, N, / were typing wacky and different letters. I realized that if it was a hardware problem the keys would not work at all. The conclusion I came up with was it was a software confusion and the keyboard needed a reset or something. I ran disk utilities repair and it fixed it 😕. Every now and then it will go back to it’s wacky problem but disk utilities seems to fix it, idk why that would fix it 😕 .

All one needs to do in order to eliminate the issue of dealing with liquid spills on MBPs is:

DO NOT DRINK OR EAT NEAR YOUR MBP!

Elementary.

Ciao.

" disk utilities seems to fix it, idk why that would fix it"

That doesn't make sense to me either.

" I had after turning it back on was the keys 6, Y, J, N, / were typing wacky and different letters."

So you can see from the pix I posted that the 6, y, j, keys can be electrically interconnected. (See pics above.)

If it get's worse you might need a bluetooth keyboard. I did that before I bit the bullet and replaced the upper case. I.e. keyboard.

" It worked fine but the only problem"

Hopefully that will continue but it should have been checked out by someone who knows what to look for.