A liquid-damaged MacBook Pro with its storage soldered to a board that no longer powers up. The memory itself was undamaged and it made no difference at all — and the same machine gets quoted four figures elsewhere.
A MacBook Pro that had taken a spill and would not power on. The owner was most of the way through writing a book. She had already been quoted a four-figure sum elsewhere for “board-level data extraction” and came for a second opinion before committing to it.
Under magnification the logic board showed corrosion right across the power circuitry the storage depends on — not surface residue but conductive tracking and lifted pads, with no realistic prospect of bringing the board up. On almost any other laptop that is a straightforward job with a well-worn answer: take the drive out and read it on something else.
From 2016 onward Apple progressively removed the removable drive. On 2018-and-later Intel machines the flash is soldered directly to the logic board and the T2 security chip sits between it and everything else. On every Apple Silicon model the same is true with the security processor integrated into the main SoC.
That produces three facts which, taken together, close the matter completely:
The flash can only be addressed through the board. There is no connector, no caddy and no adapter, because the NAND packages are surface-mounted components on the same board as everything else.
The data is encrypted at rest, always. This is not FileVault and it is not optional. The controller encrypts everything written to that flash whether or not the user ever enabled anything, and the encryption cannot be turned off.
The key is fused to that individual board. It lives inside the secure enclave, it is generated on that specific machine, it never leaves the enclave in readable form, and there is no mechanism — supported or otherwise — to export it or transfer it to a replacement board.
The board was destroyed. The key went with it.
This needs saying plainly, because it is advertised for these machines and it sounds entirely plausible.
Chip-off means desoldering the NAND packages from the board and reading them on a dedicated programmer. It is a real technique, we know how it works, and it is genuinely useful on devices that store data unencrypted — USB sticks, monolithic memory cards, some older embedded storage. Flash packages also survive liquid ingress well, so the chips on this machine were almost certainly readable.
None of that helps. What a successful chip-off returns from a T2 or Apple Silicon Mac is the encrypted contents: a bit-perfect copy of ciphertext, with the only key that opens it fused into a chip on the board that failed. Modern key lengths are not brute-forceable in any timeframe that means anything — not with more money, not with more hardware, not eventually.
So this is not a service we offer on these machines. We do not desolder Apple storage, we do not quote for it, and we would not take the job if asked. It is not a limit of our equipment: it is that the operation produces a perfect copy of something nobody can read, and charging for that is not a recovery however it appears on the invoice.
If a laboratory quotes you four figures to extract data from a T2 or Apple Silicon Mac with a dead board, ask them directly what they intend to do about the encryption key. The answer to that question is the whole job.
The distinction matters, because “MacBook” covers two entirely different situations and people arrive assuming the worst about a machine that is fine.
Pre-2016 MacBooks, iMacs and Mac minis generally have storage that lifts out — 2.5″ SATA drives, or Apple’s proprietary blade SSDs which sit in a socket and read perfectly well through the right adapter. Those recover routinely, and a dead logic board on one of them is an inconvenience rather than an ending. iMac Fusion Drives are two separate removable devices under one logical volume, and recover in full when both halves are imaged and rejoined.
What changed is not that Apple made storage harder to reach. It is that Apple made the storage cryptographically inseparable from the machine, which was a deliberate and defensible security decision — a stolen Mac gives up nothing — with the unavoidable corollary that a dead machine gives up nothing either.
We declined at the 48-hour diagnostic and charged nothing, then spent the remainder of that conversation on the only thing that was going to work: finding the copies.
This is more productive than it sounds. Material that feels like it exists in one place usually does not. In this case there was an old Time Machine drive at a relative’s house, chapter drafts sent to two people as email attachments, and a Word autosave folder on a previous laptop that had never been wiped. Between them she recovered most of the book.
The checklist we work through is short and costs nothing: iCloud Drive and Desktop & Documents sync; any Time Machine or clone drive however old; email sent items for attachments; Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive folders; shared or collaborated documents; and previous machines that were retired rather than erased.
On a T2 or Apple Silicon Mac, the backup is the recovery, and it has to exist before the failure rather than after it. There is no laboratory anywhere holding a technique that changes this, and any suggestion otherwise deserves a direct question about the key.
Where a Mac’s storage does come out, recovery is routine work here from £300 +VAT, with Fusion Drives at £550 +VAT flat. Soldered storage on a dead board is not something we take on, and you will hear that at the free diagnostic rather than after an invoice.
Kick off with an instant online quote, or ring us and talk it through first. Either way you’ll know a clear, fixed price before any work starts.