So my spouse has a 2016 MBP, which he's basically okay with. Except that it stopped charging. The first time this happened, earlier today, reseating the power cable caused it to wake up. Now it's dead again.
Problem: I don't have anything else that uses USB-C for power, except that my primary working laptop can optionally do that, except all it'll do with under 90W is announce that there's not enough power to run it. So I have three things that theoretically provide USB-C charging, and none of them appear to power the MBP through any port.
But I can't tell for sure, because there's no indicator lights of any kind. The charger doesn't have one, the cable doesn't have one, the machine doesn't have one. So I can't tell the difference between "has power but needs to charge for a while before it can come on" and "doesn't have power".
Anyone have any suggestions for ways to debug or diagnose this? Any notion what's likely at fault? If, as I sort of suspect, the problem is internal to the machine (after all, I do have three things that should be able to power it, and three different power cables, and none work), we're sorta screwed, because obviously there's no way to make backups from it, and we can't take the drive out to copy data off it...
EDIT: So I remembered that my Dell has a BIOS setting for reporting on insufficient power from power adapters, so I tried things with it.
Apple charger and cable: Reports 60W, which is what I'd expect.
OWC Dock: Reports 45W. Seems low but it does show up.
Dell dock: Works fine. (Only expect 60W with other machines, though.)
So any of these should be enough to power the machine on, or charge its battery. Actual behavior: Nothing at all.
You know, I really don't like the thing where Apple took away features like a charge indicator LED, or a battery status meter you can activate by pushing a button. Those were useful in situations like this.
Problem: I don't have anything else that uses USB-C for power, except that my primary working laptop can optionally do that, except all it'll do with under 90W is announce that there's not enough power to run it. So I have three things that theoretically provide USB-C charging, and none of them appear to power the MBP through any port.
But I can't tell for sure, because there's no indicator lights of any kind. The charger doesn't have one, the cable doesn't have one, the machine doesn't have one. So I can't tell the difference between "has power but needs to charge for a while before it can come on" and "doesn't have power".
Anyone have any suggestions for ways to debug or diagnose this? Any notion what's likely at fault? If, as I sort of suspect, the problem is internal to the machine (after all, I do have three things that should be able to power it, and three different power cables, and none work), we're sorta screwed, because obviously there's no way to make backups from it, and we can't take the drive out to copy data off it...
EDIT: So I remembered that my Dell has a BIOS setting for reporting on insufficient power from power adapters, so I tried things with it.
Apple charger and cable: Reports 60W, which is what I'd expect.
OWC Dock: Reports 45W. Seems low but it does show up.
Dell dock: Works fine. (Only expect 60W with other machines, though.)
So any of these should be enough to power the machine on, or charge its battery. Actual behavior: Nothing at all.
You know, I really don't like the thing where Apple took away features like a charge indicator LED, or a battery status meter you can activate by pushing a button. Those were useful in situations like this.
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