My luck ran out last night. The Magsafe's side of the cable gave in too - in exactly the same way. I still wasn't ready to fork out chests full of gold for new cables.
The rupture appeared too close to the Magsafe head. To fix it up reliably, I broke apart the Magsafe head with a flat screw driver.
The live wires run along the centre core. The ground wires inter-weave around the live core, with a rubber sheath between them - which ruptured at a point. Considering how thin the sheath is, this is very poor design.
The bearded wires carry the ground into the Magsafe head, while the live wires run right into the centre of the head.
The design of how the live and ground run in the cable, made it immensely challenging to repair. My first attempt to solder wires onto the remnants of the wires dangling off the Magsafe head didn't work. The bearded ground wires were too weak to hold the voltage level.
Upon closer inspection, there were two clear ground soldered points on the PCB. I beefed up the live solder and tapped onto the ground points on the board.
The wires had to be connected at different points. It was almost like surgery fixing up the wires.
All done. Thankfully, there was light, and laptop began charging!
Gotta beautify it a little .. with electric tape.
Can't do, too hideous. How about a little clear tape?
Worse. But after toying around for a day, I eventually settled with a sweet sweet glue-gunned connector head!
Needed to give some strength to the wires too, so here's how it looks in the end!
Final take: The power cables that come with the Apple Macbooks, Macbook Pros and Macbook Airs are horrible. They are not adequately built to carry stress on their ends. It wouldn't have made sense to get a new adaptor, that would be as poorly designed as the one I had; And a new Macbook Magsafe adaptor would have set me back USD 79. My battery didn't perform any better. Less than a year after I got my Macbook, it couldn't even hold charge for ten minutes. And who know what damage my boards would have sustained with the electric noise all these while?
Apple's OS X is a great piece of software, but their portables are not nearly as fantastic. I'm stuck with a mal-performing and unreliable 13" desktop computer, with some time left to go in college. If you enjoyed this post, do consider donating towards a laptop!
