These folks are truly incredible. Some background: over a decade ago, I spent a several years…read morerepairing Macs at the Genius Bar, before moving onto other roles within the company (and eventually after many years leaving). Flash forward to now: my work MacBook Pro suddenly completely dead. No power, not charging, and all USB-C ports showing only drawing 5v. I did my own work down, attempting to isolate to bare minimum components in order to get it to boot. I've worked on enough of these machines to suspect liquid damage even though there hadn't been any spills or anything, and I pulled the logic board and did a close visual inspection looking for blown MOSFETs or any real sign of dried liquid. Found nothing, and I was a little disappointed that my old skills were failing me.
Critically, I needed data on the machine that had not yet been backed up. (Dumb.) Unlike back in the day, there's no removable flash storage chip that you can mount in an enclosure and get back on data. In fact, the data itself is now encrypted against the security chip on the machine, so really the only option is to get the machine booting again, or spend $2000-$5000 on forensic data recovery (and even then with the encryption, I wasn't confident if that was a viable option anymore).
I knew that if I brought the machine to Apple, they would try very few things to get the machine up and booting with my data intact before replacing components, and thus taking my data with it. I also knew I was probably looking at $1500-$1800 in logic board part cost.
I bring it to Alex and crew at MacFixed. Alex called me within 24h and filled me in on his initial diagnosis, which told me that I wasn't missing anything silly and that the issue was way deeper than anything I could address. Approved the repair and he went to work. Pricing was an incredibly good deal, somebody this skilled deserves to be paid for their time, and with the amount of time debugging that this kind of issue would require, I got out the door for $550 which is an absolute steal. I mentioned the alternative repair options and their prices, and hopefully that puts that cost in perspective.
Well, Alex solved it, after spending an entire weekend on the thing. He told me he eventually noticed something just slightly off on a surface mount component's pad, just a slight shift in coloring, and desoldered it on speculation to finally find the issue. Some truly microscopic amount of liquid managed to wedge itself under the chip and short out the entire machine. He replaced the chip, revived my machine, and even maintained a backup for me while I went home to get a second copy for redundancy created. He said he saved the chip to show me, and when I picked up my machine I couldn't believe how small it truly was. Unbelievable. Attaching photos to this review.
I'll come to ya'll again in a heartbeat and sharing positive word of mouth every chance I get. Thank you again guys.