MacBook SSD Catches Fire: Can the Data Be Recovered?
A MacBook Air produces visible smoke from the SSD area on power-up. Multimeter reads 0.4 ohms across the SSD pins; a direct short circuit causing thermal runaway. This 72-minute video covers the damage assessment, the obstacles to recovery on soldered Apple storage, and what T2/Apple Silicon encryption means when the logic board itself is damaged.
What Caused the Smoke
A short circuit in the SSD controller or NAND array draws uncontrolled current, generating enough heat to ignite component epoxy and melt solder joints. The multimeter confirmed near-zero resistance (0.4 ohms) across the SSD pins. Once a short develops, current flow increases, resistance drops further, and the temperature climbs in a destructive feedback loop. This happens within seconds.
Visible smoke means localized temperatures exceeded approximately 400C. At that temperature, NAND flash cells lose stored charge, gate oxide breaks down, and the metal interconnects within chips can melt or vaporize. The controller chip is also destroyed, which means even undamaged NAND chips may be inaccessible because recovery equipment has no way to communicate with them.
The Encryption Problem
On Macs with a T2 security chip (late 2017 onward, starting with the iMac Pro), the SSD data is encrypted with keys stored on the T2, bound to that specific logic board. If the logic board is too damaged to power on, those keys are inaccessible. Even if a technician desolders the NAND chips, reads the raw data, and reconstructs the file system, the data is still encrypted.
Apple Silicon Macs (M1/M2/M3) make this worse. The encryption keys live inside the CPU's secure enclave, and the NAND, CPU, and security coprocessor are cryptographically bound together. The only viable recovery path is repairing the logic board itself at the microsoldering level so it can boot long enough to provide decryption keys.
Recovery is possible if the NAND chips physically survived the heat (not charred or melted), the logic board can be repaired enough to power on temporarily, and the customer has their FileVault password or recovery key. If the NAND is visibly charred, or the T2/Apple Silicon chip is destroyed with no password available, the data is gone.
MacBook Smoking? Step One: Stop Powering It On
Every additional power-on attempt after visible smoke makes recovery less likely. Send it to us unpowered. We'll assess whether the NAND survived and whether the logic board can be repaired enough to extract your data.