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I used my MacBook Pro (Late 2017) in the recent days, but suddenly it had an unexpected shutdown and the screen went dark. What I saw before the immediate shutdown was a notification, but I wasn’t able to read anymore since the shutdown occurred just a few milliseconds.

Well since then, I can't start the MacBook anymore. I can press the button and I can feel, that the Trackpad is active, so it is „clickable“. But unfortunately there is no screen turning on or any component running else on the Mac.

Does anyone had something similar in the past or is there a keyboard shortcut to get to some recovery tools? I just wanted to ask before I go to a repair store since the warranty has expired.

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    1. Do you hear a boot chime? 2. Does the caps lock key light when you press it? 3. Have you tried booting in Safe Mode (Shift during boot), Recovery Mode (Command+R during boot), Verbose Mode (Command+V during boot), Boot Picker (Option during boot), or Target Disk Mode (T during boot)?
    – pion
    Commented Sep 4, 2021 at 20:19
  • @pion No unfortunately I don’t hear any boot chime and also the key light on the caps lock don’t turn on. I also tried many of key combinations to access the recovery tools or boot picker, but here again without success. Also when I plugin the power adapter, it does not make any chime. May there is a hardware problem or something wrong with the BIOS. Thanks for your help.
    – Julian
    Commented Sep 5, 2021 at 9:15
  • Do you have another power adapter you can try? Have you done an SMC reset? Do you have an external display you can attach?
    – pion
    Commented Sep 5, 2021 at 10:38
  • @pion Yes I have 2 same Power Adapters and tried it on both, without luck. I also tried now the SMC with the Powerbutton and Control Shift Option keys pressed for 10 seconds. Also after that no response. And I have attached a external Monitor now also without a signal there. So propably I have to go the store next week. Thank you very much for your help.
    – Julian
    Commented Sep 5, 2021 at 14:51

1 Answer 1

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From all the comments and almost all your original symptoms, the failure appears to occur very early in the boot flow, somewhere between power sequencing and early EFI. It would almost certainly be a hardware issue. In any case, there are no readily available ways to debug something that fails that early without additional tools.

The only thing that I don't understand is why you're able to click the trackpad. The 2017 model has a haptic trackpad, which means that the only way it's clickable is if (1) it has a regulated power supply and (2) its controller driver is loaded and running. The latter requires late firmware or OS time, either of which would give you visible signs of life. One possible scenario is that your backlight suddenly died and also your sound output is set to zero volume, so that it appears like the machine is dead when it's really not. But the external display would have resolved that...

If you have a set of secure Torx screwdrivers, you could try opening up your machine to see if one of the "power good" LEDs is lit. But you're probably going to want to make that trip to the Genius Bar in any case.

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  • So I have now a response from the repair store. They said that the GPU is defective. So we’ll since this is built in in the motherboard, it will be quiet expensive, because they have to replace the complete board. Thanks again.
    – Julian
    Commented Sep 10, 2021 at 22:58

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