Coffee vs. MacBooks: A Tale of Two Spills

A couple of weeks ago, my wife accidentally spilled coffee on her MacBook Air—of course, right when she needed it the most. She quickly grabbed my laptop and continued her work.

So, what now? We immediately turned off her MacBook and tried to dry it out. After letting it sit for a while, we attempted to power it on... but nothing happened. Not even a flicker. I didn’t spend much time troubleshooting and just hoped it would magically start working later.

The next day, I browsed the Swedish auction site Tradera and stumbled upon a MacBook Pro with great specs. I placed a single bid—and won! When it arrived, it was in near-mint condition. A few years old, but still compatible with OpenCore Legacy Patcher, which allows installation of newer macOS versions on unsupported Macs.

I installed the latest version of macOS, and everything worked perfectly... until my young daughter had her own little accident—with another cup of coffee. Not again! I had the laptop for just one day.

We dried it out again, and this time it actually powered on. But the keyboard was completely unresponsive. I ordered a replacement keyboard and installed it, but unfortunately, the issue remained. To make matters worse, I accidentally tore the trackpad cable during the repair.

Since then, I haven’t touched it. As for the original MacBook Air, it’s been resting for two weeks. The next step is to open it up and clean any components that might still be sticky with coffee.

Others have had success reviving their machines after a deep clean—hopefully, I’ll be just as lucky.

What have I learned? Keep coffee far, far away from your computer.

Fingers crossed that my next blog post will be about bringing the MacBook Air back to life!