TLDR; Rossman Repair Group was able to fix an A2289 13” MacBook Pro for less money than Apple and without losing data. I post this in hopes it helps someone else.
We purchased a new 2020 13” MacBook Pro in August of 2020 for my wife to use. It was extremely well taken care of, used at home, she used a keyboard protector, only used the Apple provided power adapter and it had generally light use of mostly web browsing and streaming videos.
Two years later the laptop went to France for a vacation – we rarely bring laptops on vacation but it was a 3 week trip and we wanted to make sure some business could be attended to. Murphy’s Law strikes and only a few days into the trip the screen went blank during use, came back then went blank again. Then no response, nothing was working, completely dead. That’s what happens when you bring your laptop on vacation!
I couldn’t do much remotely but when the laptop arrived back home I ran it through some normal tests, different power adapter, SMC resets. I opened it up, completely clean and nothing obviously fried or broken or liquid. Just dead, not charging, no sign of life. So, I made a Genius Bar appointment and took it to Apple. They did some diagnostics and said the logic board needed to be replaced for about $560. While I had current backups I didn’t really like the idea of personal files floating around in a refurbishment center on the old board as I can’t take the disk out of the machine. I passed on this.
So, I put it on a shelf, we used an old one for a bit then ordered an M1 Air. I started looking into the possibility of repairing it myself, there are a lot of videos and posts explaining this and I thought it might be fun but I’d end up spending a lot in repair tools and it would use a lot of time I don’t really have. I enjoy electronics projects but am not highly skilled at it.
This is about the time I ran into Louis Rossman’s videos on YouTube. The fast talking New Yorker was entertaining, had a level of disdain for Apple I appreciated and sounded talented in repair. Why not try them, I sent it off.
I had watched enough of Louis’ videos to know something really bad might be wrong but a lot of the repairs were replacing one chip or capacitor. I was quoted $425 for logic board repair and several days later I had a functional machine shipped back. Caveat: They would warranty the repair if I provided a password so they could run tests but I declined, not much to lose really since it was already dead.
I asked them what was wrong with it – shorted MOSFET. This is a super common problem but I wouldn’t expect a failure in a less than two year old machine. Now I can get some more use out of it …
