Chosen Solution
2011 MacBook Air belongs to my niece. She says “it just stopped working one day.” No signs of life from the power button. I researched. Found a fix on line about removing the battery cable for 30 seconds plugging it back in. Brought computer home to where I have tools (Portland OR to Vermont!) Opened case - removed cable. Put it back. Tried to boot. Nada. Attached power source and voila it booted! Shut down once and restarted. Shut down one more time and we are back to it not booting. Would love suggestions about what it wrong. Clearly it is hardware. New battery? Power connection? Thanks Annamarie Update (04/18/2018) Hi there, Okay got it running with the battery connected and got these images. (2 are the same - but I can’t figure it out. I ordered a replacement battery today along with one for MY computer which I learned is in need of replacement while doing this. (Exact same model and year.) What’s a little funky is the way the machine turns off and then boots. The MAGsafe is green. Has been for awhile. It wasn’t connecting yesterday but I cleaned it and that might have made a difference? But right now it seems stable and is on with the battery connected. I did discover that the settings for the battery were set to NEVER turn off. Ugh.
Any other thoughts? This has been really helpful. Update (04/18/2018) Hmm.. I wonder why they were so grainy - might have been better to share a dropbox link? Anyways I took a screenshot and used Airdrop.
It’s got 826 loadcycles.! Menu applet says Service Battery with the triangle. Computer has been stable and on for 12 hours - with the battery connected and power connected. I’ve learned a lot.
Good to hear you got it running! OK, lets do one more check. Download this gem of an App CoconutBattery It would be nice to get the system working one more time with the battery connected so we can check the batteries health. Even still this app can at least give us a clue how the charging logic is doing. Once you get it running take a snapshot of the main window and paste it here for us to see. Adding images to an existing question Given the age of your system you likely need a new battery, but I want to make sure the charging logic is working correctly. When you plug in the MagSafe the LED should be Amber right now with no battery connected. When you plug the battery in it should be Amber if the battery is low and then turn Green when charged. Looking at the Menu icon it should show a battery icon with a lighting bolt if its Red the battery is not responding to SMC and likely bad. Update (04/18/2018) Looks like all you’ll need here is a new battery! As you can see in the first snaps battery is charging and likewise is discharging in your last snap. Don’t wait to long as batteries on their last legs tend to swell up which could damage your system. You should also alter your habits a bit here. If we divide out the number of cycles by the year the system was introduced you have cycling the batter over a 100 times per year. That’s a bit much! The battery was not designed to be cycled that hard. To clarify what a cycle is is also important. Everytime you let the systems battery drop to less than 5% the system needs to work harder to recharge the battery. Unlike NiCad’s LiOn batteres don’t need this type of deep cycling to work properly (NiCad’s have a memory issue where you needed to do deep cycling). Ideally, try to limit running the system that low to often.
If you are able to, download Apple Service Diagnostic test 146 from the internet and run it to see if it fails at a certain point.
