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A year ago I bought a MacBook Air 2011 (i7, 4GB RAM) running High Sierra for a few bucks. There have been occasional hiccups, but overall the machine still works surprisingly well.

The previous owner had installed a 3rd party battery which had just a few cycles at the time. macOS was reporting a battery issue, apart from that everything was working.

A few days ago, I pressed the power button and after a long while it finally began booting with the fan going crazy.

  • The power adapter LED is off.
  • When I try to enable the battery icon in top bar, it appears and immediately disappears.
  • CPU load in System monitor is normal (low) but the fan keeps going as if it were under a full load.

I assume the battery is dead. However before I order a replacement, and a screwdriver to open it up, I wanted to ask if my assumption is likely correct. Could there be any caveats more experienced users know about? I don't have much experience with these machines, I've been a long time ThinkPad user.

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I would certainly open it up! It's one of old Mac, from the days when it was relatively easy to undo all the screws, and when there was stuff you could actually do.

You can still get replacement batteries for these models -- but of course they are not Apple's own, so they can be a bit of a lottery, as you don't how closely the factory is working to Apple's own standards/QC/spec.

The laptop is designed to throttle the CPU when the battery is absent: but it otherwise should still work. The other symptoms are a bit worrying, but it's worth seeing if removing the battery completely improves things.

The fans ramping could be caused by fluff build-up; or a broken sensor. There are utilities that will show you the temps of all the sensors.

But you should reset the SMC, if you haven't already.

You can max it out with 16 Gb of RAM (204-pin PC-10600 (1333 MHz) DDR3 SO-DIMM), and replace the battery -- I presume you've already got an SSD in there? -- but it's still a 2-core, 13-year-old Mac, running a 6-year-old OS.

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  • Ok, so you're saying remove the battery, power it up and see what happens? That sounds reasonable. One question though - if I remove the battery, should I expect the LED on the charger light up under those circumstances? It may be a pointless question, not sure, if it runs, it runs. Maybe knowing that could help me make sure the charger isn't part of the problem.
    – user499618
    Commented Feb 5 at 16:38
  • @jirkap Yes, I'd expect the light on the charger still to work. It could be a 'bad' battery is worse than no battery at all -- or it could be a problem with the power management. I presume you've done an SMC reset?
    – benwiggy
    Commented Feb 5 at 17:30
  • Man, you just made my day :) I had not done SMC reset, I did not know I should have. Everything's back to normal, it's charging, fan is running silent again. This is weird! Thank you.
    – user499618
    Commented Feb 5 at 18:13

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