My Macbook Pro and Magsafe power adapter are fed up with each other. | Hacker News Reader

My Macbook Pro and Magsafe power adapter are fed up with each other.

3 pointstiminman7 comments

Every once in a while, my Magsafe won't charge my mac. The LED stays green, goes out completely, or remains lit only faintly and it sends little or no charge to the battery. This happens intermittently.

All the lights light correctly and the Mac battery receives a charge when I plug in someone else's adapter, so the problem is not my Mac.

My Magsafe adapter works correctly when plugged into someone else's computer (all the lights) so the problem is also not my adapter.

I have a friend who has the same problem, and when it happens we can trade adapters for a while and it seems to fix the issue. I'd love to hear a technical explanation of what might be going on from someone familiar with how these batteries and chargers interact.

The weakest part of a laptop is usually the AC adapter cable. Been there since day one.

Not sure why over all these years they haven't made that a replaceable component, but it is the cause of failure of many an expensive power supply. Stings even more when even Apple compatible AC adapters are in the $50 range.

Honestly, this is not a pc/apple-support site.

I did worry that people might feel I was trying to get free tech support. It's not really a problem I need to fix - I bought another adapter. I posted because though the behaviour seemed illogical to me I figured that there were people who could make sense of it.

Superuser.com

reddit.com/r/techsupport

There is likely some damage on the adapter plug, and some damage on the port on the Mac as well. On their own they aren't enough to cause a problem, but together--bam--they line up and it stops working.

I work in an environment where everyone uses a Macbook Pro and I've seen at least two cases of something like this happening, and the solution has been simply to swap adapters!

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