My MacBook Pro stopped charging – here’s how I fixed it for free

The other day, I plugged in my MacBook Pro for charging, something that I’ve done countless times over the past few years. The charge connector magnetically attached to my MacBook and then… Nothing.

Uh oh.

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I fiddled with the connector a few times and I got some intermittent bursts of charging, which, to be fair, didn’t look all that promising. Had I damaged the cable? Had the charger blown up? Had I somehow caused some expensive mishap to happen to my MacBook Pro? I didn’t like the idea of any of that.

I gingerly detached the charge connector from the MacBook Pro and took a look at it. To my surprise, I saw that there was some kind of charring, burn mark, or corrosion on the charge connector pins.

Was this something that I could fix? Better still, was this something I could fix without throwing a pile of money at it?

I decided to give it a go. After all, I don’t think I could break it any worse than it was already broken.

I grabbed a Q-tip and a spray can of my favorite electrical cleaner — DeoxIT D5. 

This stuff is expensive — doubly so because I’m in the UK — but in my experience, it’s worth every penny. It’s designed to remove oxidation and lubricate, seal, and protect electrical connections. I’ve used this stuff a lot and it’s got me out of a lot of trouble over the years.

I was hoping that it would get me out of trouble this time.

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My plan was to spray the Q-tip with the contact cleaner and then use the Q-tip to clean the connector. I soaked the Q-tip in contact cleaner, and in the process soaked my bench. Oh dear, that was probably a few dollars worth of cleaner. Thankfully, the cleaner evaporates quickly and doesn’t damage plastics.

I gave the connector a good clean and quite a bit of the black muck came off. 

However, to get inside the connector properly, I cut the Q-tip in half and used the cardboard stalk to complete the cleaning process, being careful not to damage anything (although I find the MagSafe connector to be extremely robust).

I’m not sure what the debris in the connector was. While I’d initially thought it was corrosion, I think it was something trapped between the connector and the MacBook, and that had overheated and melted. As good as the MagSafe connectors are, things can get trapped in there.

I gave the connector on the MacBook a quick clean as well, just to make sure that there wasn’t anything on the pins that could impede charging. And once the contact cleaner was dry, I attached the charging cable (and crossed my fingers in the hope that I didn’t need to buy a new cable, charger, or MacBook Pro).

It worked!

This is not the first time that I’ve seen random debris caught up in the laptop’s charge connector. And as much as I like MagSafe, it does seem prone to these sorts of problems. 

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Just a few weeks ago, I saw a MacBook that couldn’t charge due to tiny magnetic particles in the connector, resembling sand or maybe workshop grinding debris. Whatever it was, after a quick clean, that MacBook was ready to go again. I’ve also seen one case where some paper had been caught in the connector, and probably about a dozen instances where random buildup of dirt, lint, and other junk had stopped the charging.

So, if you run into problems with yours, take a look in case anything has gotten caught up in there. You could be lucky, like I was.