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I'm an IT guy of a company. We have ordered some 16" macbooks for our developers but they're not charging/ booting up. When I try to boot up, a battery icon appears on black screen just like empty battery situation despite being charged for hours! I'm attaching a photo. I've tried SMC reset and other stuff mentioned in Apple website but no luck. I've 6 macbooks like that! Very disappointing... I'm just wondering, if anyone else come across this issue before or solved?

enter image description here

Regards!

Halit D
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    Are you using the exact chargers that came with the laptop? Have you left it charging overnight? – lhf Sep 07 '20 at 12:03
  • yes, I'm using the stock charger. Left for few hours not overnight. But no sign about charging.. – Halit D Sep 07 '20 at 12:05
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    Do I read the question aright: you have 6 new MacBook Pros all of which are not (apparently) charging ?! And you have checked several chargers, several wires, several wall sockets, and eliminated the possibility that it is not the Macs but some other part of the charging apparatus ? – High Performance Mark Sep 07 '20 at 12:18
  • @HighPerformanceMark, yes, exactly, I've tried all these to eliminate all these possibilities. – Halit D Sep 07 '20 at 12:30
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    I've never come across this. Take them back to your supplier and get replacements. – benwiggy Sep 07 '20 at 12:57
  • Did you try that charger(s) with another computer. It's USB-C compliant and will work with any other USB-C compliant device (Dell, Lenovo, HP, Chromebook, etc.) Vice versa: did you try the MBPs with a different brand USB-C charger? Did you verify that your mains socket has voltage (test with a multi-meter)? There's lots of diagnostic steps that's missing from the question here. – Allan Sep 07 '20 at 22:19
  • @HalitD, what are exact specs of the laptops that exhibited this behavior? I had the exact same thing happen with two of the following 16-inch MBP laptops, both purchased new from the Apple Store in Ann Arbor, Michigan on Sept 13, 2020: MBP 16.0 SG/2.4GHZ 8C/32GB/5500M/2TB – Brian Kelly Sep 14 '20 at 16:01
  • SMC reset and then charge for 60 minutes should be enough to get any new Mac running again well enough to run a battery test (Apple service tool) or see system info and battery health info. – bmike Sep 14 '20 at 17:19
  • same thing is happening to me – nonopolarity Apr 12 '21 at 05:31
  • Were you able to resolve the problem? I am facing the same issue. – Anshul May 18 '21 at 19:14

6 Answers6

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Just wanted to share my potential fix of this issue.

I bought a refurbed 16" i9 from Micro Center and out of the box, I couldn’t get it to boot up. I had the exact same screen that others in this thread did. Tried resetting the PRAM, and then tried Artem’s method. No luck.

I then randomly noticed that holding down Control, Option, and Command without the charger plugged in gave me a slightly different screen. It was the red battery logo with the lighting bolt, but then it would also have the little AC plug icon next to it. I then tried plugging in the USB-C cord in after holding down these three keys, while the red battery/lighting bolt/AC plug icons were on the screen. I then heard the familiar “boop” sound (which I never heard before).

When I went to try this again, I got the Apple logo and the boot up bar on my screen, and the machine proceeded to start up normally. Went to check the batter in info right away, and the machine only had 6 battery cycles on it.

In short, here’s what I did.

  1. Hold down Control, Option, and Command without the AC power plugged in for 5-7 seconds.

  2. This resulted in the screen showing the red battery, lighting bolt, and AC plug icon (for about 5 seconds).

  3. Plugged in the AC power while this screen in #2 was on. Heard the familiar “boop” sound.

  4. Hit a key and the machine powered on.

I still have a 15 day return window on the machine so I plan on running the battery down to zero to see if this issue comes up again. If it does, I’ll probably take it back.

user3439894
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Terry
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  • I just wanted to add a datapoint that this exact step worked for me, for others who may have the same experience. – joon Dec 07 '21 at 19:16
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This happened to me twice in the past day: I purchased both of the following model MacBook Pro 16-inch laptops and both exhibited the exact same behavior. They never booted. I never saw any screen other than the empty battery screen with charge icon. I used the 96W USB-C Apple power adapters that shipped with the Mac. Nothing. Two lemons in a row!

Brand new MacBook Pro 16-inch dead on arrival battery icon black screen

MBP 16.0 SG/2.4GHZ 8C/32GB/5500M/2TB-USA Part Number: MVVN2LL/A $3,899 retail price

Third time's a charm? I'll let you all know later today...

Brian Kelly
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    Oh, and for what it's worth: I did try SMC reset. After holding down the power button for ~10 seconds I can hear the fans spin up quickly and then within a second... nothing. They go silent. About 20-30 seconds later, I see same battery icon.

    Also: This battery icon only shows if you have power connected. Nothing will show up running on battery power alone. I tried charging overnight. Nothing. If you wait for the icon to show and then pull out the USB-C power it immediately turns off.

    One other tidbit: If you have power connected you can hear the haptic feedback on the trackpad.

     – Brian Kelly Sep 14 '20 at 15:58
  • After one SMC reset, are you able to let it charge off for 60 to 90 minutes? That worked for all our Macs that were low when we opened them. We didn’t need SMC for most and all revived well for us after getting some time on charge. – bmike Sep 14 '20 at 17:18
  • @bmike Yep, I tried that. No dice. These were lemons the best I can tell. Stay tuned for my Apple Store experience with try #3… – Brian Kelly Sep 14 '20 at 21:20
  • Well, Apple has supported me exceptionally well when I get hardware that fails soon after delivery. I hope they get you running and then analyze the failures in detail on their time. I’m interested to hear how it works out for you. Please update when you have a finding. – bmike Sep 14 '20 at 21:55
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    Going into the Apple Store yesterday, I had a greater than 50% feeling that the third and final MBP 16.0 SG/2.4GHZ 8C/32GB/5500M/2TB that they had in stock would also suffer from this problem...

    …and I was correct. Three lemons in a row. Staff said they've never seen this happen.

    But, there's a happy ending to the story. Because they had no more of these in stock, they upgraded me—at no charge—to the June 2020 model with the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M with 8GB of HBM2 memory. That one booted right up, and it's what I'm typing on now. $600 for pain and suffering. I'll take it!

     – Brian Kelly Sep 16 '20 at 00:08
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There is a problem with the USB mux chip that will prevent the MacBook from charging.

The mux chip is what negotiates the power required (20V) to charge the Mac. What's happening is 5V is being passed so there's enough to power the Mac to display the icon you're seeing, but not enough to power it or charge the battery.

The chip in question is the CD3215. I've seen reports where liquid damaged caused the issue and other reports where they simply fail out of the box. There's more on this issue on this video.

The fix is to replace the logic board (especially if brand new or still under AppleCare) or to have the chip replaced by a place that does board level repair (Rossman Repiar in the video is excellent - not affiliated, just a happy customer).

Allan
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    Also, there was a lot of chatter about firmware and updates this summer disabling some ports on iMac Pro, Mac Mini and MacBook Pro so I would try charging from all 4 ports, 30 minutes each sequentially before starting a repair. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/security-updates-may-disable-usb-c-thunderbolt-port.2227917/ – bmike Oct 17 '20 at 18:34
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I've got the same issue. I'm a remote developer and my company sent to me a new machine.

Just unpackaged fresh MacBook Pro 16 (model a2141, MVVL2RU/A, 2.6GHz 6C / 16GB,AMD Radeon Pro 5300M 4GB / 512GB).

It wasn't charged which is strange for Apple product - usually you expect it to turn on right out of the box.

And now it was trying to charge for almost 24h but it still won't launch. I can see keyboard lit and battery icon on screen for about 10 sec and then it's turning off.

I've checked that wire and adaptor are working, because they were able to charge another MacBook Pro 16 but with a little different configuration (A1990) Soo look's like I need to get replacement...

won't charge

UPDATE: (Excuse me for my English...) Okay, so, after a day of searching for a solution MacBook finally turned on.

What I did?

Actually I do not have any special solution for this, I can only explain what were the trials.

I tried to reset SMC many times randomly using different schemes from internet, because they are differ for MacBook generations. Every scheme was tried more than once, so I'm not sure that it was a solution.

Before that I tried to charge MacBook using every usb-c port without any luck. But MacBook even didn’t become warm.

So what I noticed: If you plug usb-c wire you can see battery icon with and little thunder icon for about 10 secs. If you unplug the wire screen will turn off immediately.

So I tried to check every port successively. I plug a wire, see icon and then unplug it so screen become black.

I tried this for every port several times and on the next trial I saw that little thunder icon changed for a millisecond before screen turned off.

It was something new and after that I plugged wire in again and noticed that MacBook become warm. After 15 minutes I tried to unplug and plug wire again and MacBook turned on.

I do not now if it was any coincidence or whatnot but this is what I did.

Artem Shmatkov
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I have just fixed the same issue after struggling for around 3-4 hours. I tried resetting SMC and other options found on different blogs, but no luck.

While trying with different options, I tried exactly these steps to fix my issue:

  1. I plugged in stock charger given in the Macbook pro box, and kept on clicking using trackpad (force touching it), it showed me low battery icon:

enter image description here

  1. I unplugged the charger while I kept clicking the trackpad, the sign changed to this: enter image description here

  2. Then I again plugged in the charger, and it made the chime sound (like how normal iPhones/Mac machines make when they are plugged to charge)

  3. On clicking the touchpad it again showed me the step 1 icon, I waited for 5-10 minutes, hoping that my Macbook Pro is now charging.

  4. Voila, Apple logo showed up:

enter image description here

Hope this helps! Thanks

Aman Mittal
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I've a solution. It works 100%. all that you need - another macbook pro.

  1. install "apple configurator 2" from app store
  2. google how to DFU mode on broken laptop https://mrmacintosh.com/how-to-restore-bridgeos-on-a-t2-mac-how-to-put-a-mac-into-dfu-mode/
  3. connect broken laptop to worked laptop
  4. When you see "DFU" device - press "recovery" button
  5. enjoy %)
Mihail Sokolovsky
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