Chosen Solution
Hey IFIXIT Community. I have a 13" MacBook Pro Early 2015 (A1502) laptop. I bought it used a year ago. The laptop was in mint condition, from what I ascertained, with only 50 power cycles. Now it has roughly 550 power cycles at roughly 83% battery capacity. There is plenty of disk space. This laptop doesn’t have water damage or physical damage. I have encountered no issues up until this point. My issue suddenly happened over the course of 3 days. Last week, after installing Catalina and running it for a few days, the laptop began to freeze. The screen would freeze and the trackpad would become unresponsive until I forced a restart. This began to happen more often, even occasionally entering into a restart loop (boot loop). I reset the NVRAM/PRAM and SMC, checked/repaired the SSD disk permissions, and conducted an Apple Diagnostics test by holding down the “D” key. These would allow me to use the laptop for a day and then a few hours. I backed up via Time Machine. Gradually it became permanently stuck in a boot loop. The diagnostics test that I conducted twice only returned the following: “The battery will need to be replaced soon. It is functioning normally, but holds less charge than it did when it was new. Reference Code: PPT002”. Now, the laptop is unresponsive when not plugged in. When plugged in, the power button will start up the laptop to Apple logo screen. The loading bar will load halfway, then shut down, and begin again. A boot loop. I can’t access Safe Mode, Recovery Mode, Single User Mode, Verbose Mode, etc. It either won’t respond to my key commands or go black halfway through startup and get stuck in a boot loop every time. I brought it to a local Apple Authorized repair shop and they ran their tests. Their conclusion: “The unit is stuck in what appears to be a pram reset. Probable faulty logic board and the battery is swollen slightly. I don’t recommend repairing for what would be around $900. Not able to diagnose the unit.” They recommended, first, an upper case replacement (including the battery) and, second, a logic board replacement. This would all amount (including labor) to near $900. At first I thought this must just be a battery issue, but I believe it’s a deeper hardware issue now. I’m worried that my charger or the Catalina update perhaps caused this issue. I was traveling extensively with the laptop when the charger stopped working. It would be unresponsive or blink between green and orange. I only fixed it by bending the cable at just the right angle and eventually cleaning the contacts. Additionally, I have read online that other people believe the 64-bit Catalina update caused a corruption to their 32-bit entitlement management software on the EFI (BIOS) firmware on their chip. Does anyone have any clue what the issue could be? I’m trying not to spend $900.
First reasonable step would be to disconnect the battery from the logic board and go for a trial run from magsafe only. A faulty battery can cause a number of issues that would disappear at once when battery is out of the way. It’s a fast and efficient verification you can do..if issues disappear, replace battery or topcase, that depends on your skills and confidence.
