I experienced a water spill on my MacBook Air today and the computer was expected to become six years old during the week of the incident. My Mac was already due for replacement in a few weeks time due to considerable wear and tear and two missing key caps (along with the risk of a third key cap popping out). What can I do to make sure that I can still use the Mac for as long as possible before the replacement arrives?
Spilled water on my 6-year-old MacBook Air
I experienced a water spill on my MacBook Air today and the computer was expected to become six years old during the week of the incident. […]What can I do to make sure that I can still use the Mac for as long as possible before the replacement arrives?”
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Recovering your Data:
If you were to get an older, Intel-based Mac, and it is not associated to anyone’s account, you can transfer the entire Mac or just specific items over to it from a Time Machine Backup, through use of Migration Assistant. Elsewise, without a Time Machine Backup, it’s a matter of restoring it from other sources (ie cloud storage and flash drives).
Apple has a reputation for providing updates for 7 years, and then stops providing them. So, take this as a good reason to upgrade to a much newer Mac.
I too had the same problem with my older MacBook Air (Intel based) in 2022. I upgraded to the 15 inch M2 MacBook Air, and I can honestly say I am glad I did a Time Machine backup on the old MacBook Air, because I was able to transfer my data to my new M2 MacBook Air.
“I too had the same problem with my older MacBook Air (Intel based) in 2022. I upgraded to the 15 inch M2 MacBook Air, and I can honestly say I am glad I did a Time Machine backup on the old MacBook Air, because I was able to transfer my data to my new M2 MacBook Air.”
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👍 Excellent job troubleshooting that!
well my Mac is working good for now aside from one of the ports not working, but I am planning to retire the computer before the corrosion causes the computer's logic board to be destroyed and will render it unusable. the water damage was minor because the computer was stored in the bag and closed at the time of the spill.
In this case the Mac was running a soon to be unsupported os version (Sonoma). It had missing key caps and considerable wear and tear. I had several issues with it, including a series of kernel panics in January 2023. The plan is to retire it before the logic board corrodes completely.
Luck & prayer are your only hopes. I do not recommend spending any money to repair any Intel Macs for multiple reasons....besides liquid damage repairs are even more expensive than other repairs.
If you know a tech, they could disconnect the battery (depending on the model there may be two connections) since a powered circuit & liquid will create corrosion which is what usually kills a device assuming it survived the initial spill. It can take a while for liquids to evaporate & they can get trapped in unseen areas beneath the chips.
Unless you have another computer to use, you may want to move up the purchase date for a new laptop.
“In this case the Mac was running a soon to be unsupported os version (Sonoma). It had missing key caps and considerable wear and tear. I had several issues with it, including a series of kernel panics in January 2023. The plan is to retire it before the logic board corrodes completely.”
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When retiring a device…
With all the potential hazards like sparks, this is unusable, and formatting isn’t even a safe procedure. So, did you ever encrypt your hard drive? If so, you’d be just fine. If not, then, next time you go about installing a Mac, you can encrypt it by:
J4lambert wrote:
well my new Mac that this computer is replacing is not supposed to arrive until the new year so I cannot migrate it.
You can and should have good backups which you can use to transfer your data to the new Mac.
I would not rely on your liquid damaged laptop to be the source of your data for migration.....what if it doesn't survive until then?
People should always have frequent & regular backups of their computer and all external media (including the cloud). FYI, there are a lot more new ways to permanently lose access to the data stored on the internal SSD of recent Macs due to all of the hardware, software, and security changes.
“well my new Mac that this computer is replacing is not supposed to arrive until the new year so I cannot migrate it.”
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Restoring from a Backup of a Liquid Inundated Mac:
If you have a TMB or other backup prior to all of this, then that’s what to use —creating one today, you’d just get a failure and a potential spark. So, make use of what you have backed up prior to this occurrence, and know to backup every-so-often. Had to create a couple of TMBs a few days ago just before and after upgrading to macOS 26.2.
well my new Mac that this computer is replacing is not supposed to arrive until the new year so I cannot migrate it.
Spilled water on my 6-year-old MacBook Air
