Case Study
Written off twice. Recovered anyway.
A liquid-damaged 15" MacBook Pro Touch Bar arrived at our lab completely dead. Apple and a third-party repairer had both already called the data lost. We didn't.
Case Study
A liquid-damaged Touch Bar MacBook, dead on arrival.
This 2017/2018 15" MacBook Pro Touch Bar came in after a liquid spill. No power, no chime, nothing — completely dead.
The owner had already tried the obvious routes. Apple Store diagnosed the machine and considered the data on the SSD lost. A third-party Apple-authorised repairer gave the same verdict. Both offered a full logic board, display and keyboard repair priced well over £1,000 — with no data returned.
That quote wasn't unreasonable in itself: a new mainboard, LCD and keyboard for a Touch Bar MacBook Pro genuinely costs that much. But a straight parts swap discards the original logic board — and with it, the only route to whatever was still readable on the soldered SSD.
In the lab
Getting to a soldered SSD on a dead board.
- 01
Board removed and assessed
The logic board was taken out of the chassis and examined for the liquid-damage shorts and corrosion behind the total power failure.
- 02
Targeted board-level repair
Rather than replacing the board, we made the specific repairs needed to get it into a state where the soldered SSD could be addressed directly — fixing only what stood between us and the storage, not restoring the laptop to working order.
- 03
Specialist SSD extraction
With the board repaired to that point, a specialist tool was connected directly to the soldered SSD to extract the data. This class of recovery is complex and typically runs to several days rather than hours.
Outcome
Data recovered from a MacBook two shops had written off.
The data was recovered from the soldered SSD — despite two prior verdicts that it was unrecoverable, and a mainboard that no longer powered the laptop at all.
We see this pattern often: a liquid-damaged or otherwise dead newer MacBook gets treated as a straight hardware repair, and the drive is written off along with the board. On 2016–2020 MacBook models with soldered storage, our success rate on this type of case currently runs at around 80%.
If a MacBook has died and no repair has gone ahead yet, the board is usually still worth assessing for data before any parts are replaced.
Get a straight recoverability view and a fixed quote before any board work goes ahead — whether the cause was liquid, a fall, or a fault that's still a mystery.