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lotsofpulp

Is there a replaceable capacitor in a MacBook?

https://www.ifixit.com/News/62674/m2-macbook-air-teardown-ap...

https://www.ifixit.com/News/54122/macbook-pro-2021-teardown

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I see several here... is the issue the tight spacing makes it too hard?

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2022/07/18205803/MBA_M...

Yes, at least I would not be able to do it with the household soldering iron I have.

You might not but you could pay a semi-affordable third party repair place like Louis Rossmann to do it for you. That still helps the general consumer, even if its not “DIY”.

You would probably need a microscope and some appropriate tools. Looking at the 10's of thousands of $$ my neighbor has in metalworking tools, there isn't much of a problem asking home enthusiasts to buy some tools to do what they need.

There are repair shops that will replace them for you. With good equipment and a steady hand it's certainly possible.

But if you go to an Apple-certified shop they'll just swap out the entire board and call it a day. In Apple's mind those are not replaceable. In their repair system Apple treats a MacBook as a collection of maybe 20 parts and a bunch of screws.

All of them are replaceable but Apple won't provide the part numbers.

Interesting. I would have assumed anyone with the skill to work on something that tiny would be so expensive as to make repairs not worth it.

They are expensive labor but still less than half the cost of a whole new logic board with CPU, RAM, NVMe, etc. Looking at something like $600 instead of $1200+. Plus with Apple's authorized solution you are guaranteed to lose all your data, whereas third-party repair shops that do board-level repairs may often be able to avoid data loss.

My friend and I both sent our MacBooks into Louis Rossmann the same week. He spilled a cup of water on his, mine just killed itself for no reason. The repairs were expensive but they managed to not lose any data, and it still saved us many hundreds of dollars each vs. doing an Apple-authorized repair.

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