MacBook Pro 13-inch A1502 & A1708: The Five Faults We See Most

The 13-inch MacBook Pro from the mid-2010s is still everywhere in Ludhiana — on shop counters, in college bags, running accounts offices. Two board numbers dominate: the A1502 (Retina, 2013 to 2015, with the good scissor keyboard) and the A1708 (2016 to 2017, function keys, no Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard). They look similar from the outside and are almost opposites to live with.

These are the five faults that actually arrive at our bench, roughly in order of frequency.

You shine a torch at the screen at an angle and there is the desktop, faint but present. The Mac is fully alive; only the backlight is dead. On the A1502 this is very commonly the backlight fuse or the backlight driver circuit on the board, often triggered by a knock to the lid or a display cable pinched by the hinge over years of opening.

This is a board-level repair, and it is one of the most satisfying ones we do — a fuse and a driver IC bring back a machine that a replacement-only shop would have quoted a whole display assembly for. Always ask for the torch test before accepting a screen-replacement quote on these models.

The A1708 has a well-known weakness: a small IC on the board, commonly referred to by its designator U7000, sits in the display power path and fails. The symptom set is distinctive — no backlight, a display that works only at certain lid angles, or a machine that boots to a dark screen but chimes and connects to an external monitor normally.

It is repairable at chip level. What makes it worth knowing about is that the symptom looks exactly like a failed screen, and a screen assembly for this model costs several times what the chip repair does.

The A1708 carries the first-generation butterfly keyboard, and it fails in the way that generation is famous for: a key that repeats, a key that does nothing, or a key that needs a hard press while the rest are normal. A single crumb or dust particle under a key is genuinely enough.

The A1502 is not affected — it uses the older scissor mechanism, which is one of the strongest arguments for the earlier model. Apple's replacement programme for butterfly keyboards has now closed, which changes the calculation for owners; we cover that in detail in our butterfly keyboard guide.

Both of these machines are now old enough that original cells are past their design life regardless of how gently they have been used. If yours has never been replaced, assume it is due.

This is where the two models diverge most, and it matters more than anything else on this list.

On the A1502 an SSD upgrade is one of the best value repairs available anywhere: a machine that felt finished can be genuinely fast again for a fraction of a new laptop. On the A1708 the SSD is soldered, so no upgrade is possible and a dead board means the data comes back only through board-level repair.

Our honest position: yes, for most single faults. Both machines still run current software well enough for documents, browsing, accounts work and study, and a repair typically costs a small fraction of a replacement. Where we advise against it is a machine with three faults stacked up — a swollen battery, a failing keyboard and a liquid-damaged board on an A1708 can add up past what the machine is worth, and we will say so rather than take the job.

Free diagnosis either way. See the full model pages for the MacBook Pro A1502 and MacBook Pro A1708.