Devices · MacBooks and Apple desktops
Once the free look has settled what went wrong, expect £300 + VAT. A Mac is unlike other machines in three ways, and not one of them ends the job. Encryption has been running since the day you first switched it on. The flash, on most models, is soldered where it lies. And a Fusion pair means one volume laid across two separate disks by macOS; software you download deals with the first of them and stops there. All three are routine on this bench. Macs arrive from Muswell Hill studies and Ealing back offices alike, and from everywhere in London between the two. Put the password in the box with the machine.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
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| What is going on | The usual reason for it | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A blinking folder marked with a question mark | There is no startup disk it can find | Keep it off, and have the storage tested |
| A crossed circle appears as it tries to start | macOS is on there and will not load | Storage first, then the container |
| First Aid finds errors, then stops | APFS damage past anything Disk Utility repairs | Image it first; decide after that |
| disenter error -119930868, from com.apple.DiskManagement | The APFS volume will not come up | Usually readable from a clone |
| Disk Utility, error -69845: file system verify or repair has failed | Disk Utility has run out of options | Turn it off, and take it no further |
| In a boot loop since the last macOS update | Firmware or container damage; the files under it are untouched | Comes back, usually |
A case number goes on it the day the parcel lands, and an engineer settles what has truly failed before anything else happens — free of charge, and first in the order of work. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
Beneath the lock — FileVault, a T2, or the Secure Enclave on Apple silicon — every byte comes back as ciphertext. Give us the password and the job becomes routine, with the copy captured in a shape that still decrypts later on.
Unscrew a drive and it images like any other. What drops the work to component level is flash soldered down, or a board that has failed beneath it. Chips of that kind give up their contents years after a machine last ran.
On a Fusion iMac the opening half of a document can sit on flash with the remainder on the spinning disk. Both get imaged singly, after which the CoreStorage or APFS layer binding them is put back together. What returns is whole documents, rather than the split halves they were stored as.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge whatever. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have read those files on a machine of your own.
About the numbers: there are none to give. Apple does not publish reliability model by model, and no public study — Backblaze's included — has ever covered soldered Mac flash. An honest MacBook failure rate is not something anyone outside Apple could print.
An iMac the Apple Store had already given up on. Its storage turned out to be a Fusion set — flash and a spinning disk that macOS shows as one volume — with the spinning side going. The two were imaged one at a time, the pairing between them worked out from those images, and ten years of work came home.
Yes. One of two credentials — your login password, or the recovery key. It matters less than people imagine which chip is doing the locking: FileVault on the older machines, the Secure Enclave on Apple silicon, a T2 on the last of the Intel models. Hand over neither and the volume stays closed, at this laboratory and at any other.
Usually not. You asked a data question and were given a repair answer. A repairer fits a new logic board; the failed one goes on a shelf with your files still on the flash soldered to it. Getting those off is a separate trade, on separate equipment.
Because one icon in macOS stands for two physical disks — a small flash module bonded to a slower mechanical one — and the blocks of any single file may sit on either. Send half of the pair and incomplete files are all that returns. Both halves are imaged here, then the map that ties them together is rebuilt.
Usually. What it becomes is component work, carried out on the board itself. Send us the password, and leave the encryption chain exactly as it is: every chip is read in the position it occupies. Removing the flash and trying to read it apart from its own board is the approach that fails.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the drive switched off.