Can’t Power On

What happens when you press the battery checker?

Are the LED’s lit? Blinking? Or not on at all?

So the battery is charged! Then we have either a keyboard or logic board issue.

You’ll need to pop off the bottom cover and locate the power pads

MacBook Pro (15 Zoll, Anfang 2011, Unibody) Gehäuseunterteil austauschen

Locate the metal shield covering the keyboard cable along the edge of the logic board which is near the battery.

Short across the contacts marked here

Did the system start up?

At this point you’ve isolated the problem down to the logic board. Review this guide: MacBook Pro (15 Zoll, Anfang 2011, Unibody) Austausch des Logic Boards are you up to this? Are you willing to invest into the needed part?

Finding another 2011 logic board will take some effort. You also have an issue with the GPU in this series often fail as people push them too hard with newer graphics apps the system was not expected to run. Heavy graphical games came on strong very quickly Apple (and others) didn’t expect the amount of stress these would do to the systems GPUs and cooling solutions used in laptops (likely the issue here).

The 2012 logic board would be a smarter changeout (a much better GPU). It is a direct drop in! But it does need a very slight modification to the LVDS display cable as the vendor Apple used is slightly different size cable tang.

I’ve done about 40 conversions and in fact the system I’m typing this is one!

Now the elephant in the room - COVID!

Sadly finding any logic board for your system is just almost impossible as the recyclers have stopped stripping systems for parts. Be careful as there are a lot of fly by night outfits on Amazon and eBay which will gladly take your money and ship you useless junk!

Here is where I would go 2012 15” Unibody Macbook Pro Logic Boards keep an eye on them.

Otherwise, shed a tear and look for either a used 2012 system or something newer.