MacBook Pro A1502 2015 – power button not working

Hey everybody, I have an article for you here on a Macbook Pro. That really kind of wrecked my brain a little bit. I spent some time trying to figure out this really weird bug. I didn’t find a lot of information online about it, so I thought I’d share this. So what we got going on is a MacBook Pro A1502. It’s an early 2015 15 inch with a motherboard 8204924-A. Now, what happened was water exposure. A good amount of water exposure, you can see all the sensors are red every single one. So the standard process is to take the motherboard out. Clean The motherboard of corrosion. It didn’t look that bad. So I cleaned all that out. And I had another full working unit for testing, just like this one same year and model. So what I did first, I swapped out the motherboard. Put the motherboard on the testing machine. That way I know that I have all other functioning components, and it just becomes a lot easier to determine if you know the board has a problem or not.

Everything worked fine so it ended up being good to go, Then I moved the motherboard back onto the original unit. Then we noticed we had a bad battery. The battery was showing a percentage, but it really wasn’t holding any charge because it would immediately turn off, and also wasn’t charging. So I replaced the battery. Then once we did that, we found that the unit would not turn on with the power button. Prior to that, I didn’t really notice that because this unit was turning on automatically if you don’t have a battery or have a bad battery, and on the test unit everything was fine as well. Presume bad battery. Once we put the new battery it would not turn on with the power button, but it would turn off with the power button. So that was kind of tricky.

So if you take a look at this online you’re going to check the keyboard, the keyboard flex cable, the pins on the keyboard, and the power pins. All of those checked out fine. So it was really strange. I then went back to the testing unit to double-check, and everything worked perfectly fine. So what we did is just by process of elimination, just started to disconnect components, flex cables and other connectors just to try to pinpoint the issue. Then when we disconnected the trackpad, which you would think has no kind of relationship, but apparently it does on this model. So after reading, I didn’t find somebody that explained this issue, but I picked up little pieces here and there and puzzled it together. And that’s why I’m writing this article because somebody else may have this problem and save you a lot of headaches. So when disconnecting the trackpad, the power button works fine. There’s a relationship there, but when you disconnect the trackpad than the keyboard doesn’t work. So this is kind of a two-way situation where you could have that problem. So it could be the trackpad or the trackpad flex cable, either one of the two.

Once we disconnected that the flex cable, we got the same issue then replace their trackpad outside of the units as I had one here, and everything worked. So that winds up being the problem that trackpad what had some type of fail which I didn’t notice any corrosion, or anything visually on it but the trackpad had some type of failure. Apparently, the trackpad had some type of communication with the board, and that failure was causing the power button not to turn on the computer. It would shut it down, but it would not turn it on. So if you got this problem this might be a solution for you. Thank you, and for your electronic issues contact PC911.