Oh!pEnions: Repairing the Apple MacBook Charger

Repairing the Apple MacBook Charger

Just a few days ago, my Wife told me that she had issues with the MacBook. This Laptop was given to us as the one from her school was quite faulty. I planned to upgrade the RAM but at the last minute, this Laptop saved the day. So, she was happily working on it for a few years until last week.

So, after some discussion, she agreed to buy a replacement charger cable for me to replace it when I cam home. Worse case scenario? She would have to use my pre-owned ASUS.

This would be the first time I attempted to repair an Apple product instead of destroying it. After watching a few YouTube videos, I told my Wife the risks and she gave me the green light.

The replacement cable costs us about RM40.00. We could get it cheaper for RM10.50 but we would have to wait for it to ship from China,

The pinout for the charger cable. I was expecting a lot of cables but there's only two

Slide the power contact thingy away from the charger itself

Flip open the two plastic 'ears'. You can see the cable is quite worn. This is just one of the few holes I noticed in the cable's sheath

Using a pair of big-ass pliers, wedge the snout into the empty space of the 'ears' and pull the pliers apart. Do the same for the other side.

This is how the power supply looked. I lot one of the ears when it flew away.

De-solder the two cables but make sure you take note of its orientation. You might even want to take a before photo. But anyway, the cables were placed on a symbol which represents an electrolytic capacitor.

The White cable is easy to de-solder but the double-sided tape was blocking the black cable. Still it was not an issue exceot that my 30W soldering iron was not hot enough to remove the solder blobs. This is very critical since the PCB is a FR2 (the brittle SRBP material). So, I melted tome solder on the tip to make it slightly hotter. This really helped to melt the blob, enough for me to use the de-soldering pump.