Yesterdays macbook air with coffee spilled repair was quite lucky for the owner. We took computer apart, did a little board clean up. Then we let it dry for a while. Then checked the voltage on internal components, they checked out ok. Then put it back together and it worked! Good news for the customer!

However that is not always the case! And most importantly, i am getting tired of explaining to people, the fact that the first thing you want to do if you happen to spill coffee or water on your computer by accident, is to disconnect it from power source! which means unplug adapter and disconnect the battery.

Apple of course doesnt help you much with this. Especiall when they started using pentalobe shape screws on the bottom of the lid. they are the type of screws that NO ONE has a tool for them in their house, unless they have bought it on purpose. So i understand you completely if you tell me you are not able to open the lid on a macbook fast enough, because you dont have a proper screw driver to do it! not many people do!

That’s why if you spill coffee or water over your macbook air, you must rush to a nearest computer shop in the area and ask them to open it ASAP and disconnect the battery!

I can’t tell you how many macbook airs could be saved if people just did that. But they don’t!

What most people do, is they plug it in hoping macbook air with coffee spill will still work and if it works they get excited, but then 10 minutes later it stops working and they get very sad. Because they don’t understand two things:

1. water (or coffee or most fluids) is a conduit! that means electricity can travel through it. which means if you spill it over electronic components, it will bridge connections for electricity to flow in places where it is not supposed to flow. I dont know if you ever tried to touch battery terminals together on car battery, to find out that it produces lots of sparks! same thing happens inside computers .except you dont see the sparks, because components are tiny and they are hidden under the lid(which you can’t open quickly enough). those components spark and burn when coffee creates conductivity in the wrong place and then your macbook air stops working!
2. it is the power source (battery or power adapter) that causes damage to computers logic board, not the coffee or water! you can spill or you can dunk the computer into the bucket of water if you want to, then you can pull it out, dry it out, connect battery to it and it will most likely be working. But if you connect power adapter while water is present then some components will burn inevitably, because of what i mentioned in point number 1 above! It is electricity that burns things not the fluid!

And i can’t even tell you how many times people call and tell me same story. I just had another conversation today. they spilled water over macbook. and they tried to plug it in to see if it still works. It did work for 3 minutes. but then it died. Now they have to pay to fix it.

But if they just left it alone. turned it off, brought it to a computer shop like ours. We would clean it up, dry it out and the macbook air would be in perfect working condition!

Moral of the story! don’t be like most people! if you have coffee spill on macbook air, turn it off immediately and bring it back to fastest mac pc repair in newbury park, ca (fastest mac repair in thousand oaks area)! and we will take care of it for you and most likely it will work, just like the one with coffee spill in the picture!