Devices · the Apple Mac range
Three things make a Mac different, and none of them stops the job. Encryption was running before you first switched it on. The flash is fixed to the logic board on most models. A Fusion iMac lays one volume across two separate disks. Downloadable software falls over at the first of those; on the Reading bench they are three ordinary steps. Send the password with the machine, and reckon on £300 + VAT once the free look has told us what went.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
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| What you are seeing | What is likely wrong | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| A blinking question-mark folder on screen | There is no disk it can start from | Leave it off and have the drive tested |
| A crossed-out circle when it tries to start | macOS is present but will not load | Check the drive first, then the container |
| First Aid reports errors, then gives up | APFS damage past what Disk Utility can mend | Take the image; decide afterwards |
| com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930868 | The APFS container will not mount | Usually pulled back off a clone |
| File system verify or repair failed (-69845) in Disk Utility | macOS has run out of ideas | Switch it off and go no further |
| A boot loop that began with a macOS update | Firmware or container damage, with the files below it untouched | Normally comes back |
A case number goes on your device the day it reaches us, and an engineer then finds the real fault — free, and before anything else happens. You are told plainly what will come back and what will not, with one fixed figure in writing beside it. Nothing chargeable starts until you have read that and said yes.
Below the lock — and the lock may sit in FileVault, in a T2, or inside Apple silicon's Secure Enclave — every byte is ciphertext. Give us the password and this becomes an ordinary recovery. The image is captured so that it will still unlock afterwards.
If the drive comes out on screws, it is imaged like anything else. Soldered flash, or a board that has failed underneath it, drops the work to component level instead. Long after a machine has run for the last time, those chips will still hand over what they hold.
A Fusion iMac can hold the first half of a document on flash and the second half on the mechanical disk. So both get imaged on their own, and the CoreStorage or APFS structure stitching them together is rebuilt afterwards. You get documents back, not the fragments they were stored in.
You see the file list first, then decide. Nothing is invoiced until you have said yes, and on most jobs there is no fee at all if the data does not come back. What we pull off goes onto media bought in for your job, and the postage home is ours. The case stays open on the bench until you tell us the files open on your own machine.
About the figures: Apple publishes nothing model by model, and there is no public reliability study of soldered Mac flash — not even Backblaze's. Nobody can honestly print a MacBook failure rate. Only Apple holds those numbers, and it keeps them.
The Apple Store had already written this iMac off. It held a Fusion Drive — a flash module bonded to a mechanical disk, presented by macOS as one volume — and the mechanical side was failing. Both halves went to the imager separately, the pairing was rebuilt from the two images, and a design studio got its last ten years back.
Yes — and two things open it, the login password or the recovery key. Which piece of silicon holds the lock matters less than you would think: FileVault on the older machines, a T2 on late Intel models, the Secure Enclave on Apple silicon. Hand over neither and the volume stays shut, here and at every other lab.
Usually not. You asked a data question at a repair counter and got a repair answer. A repairer's fix is a fresh logic board; the failed one is set aside with your files still sitting on its flash. Getting them off again is a different trade, on different equipment.
Because the single icon in the Finder is two physical disks — a small flash module paired with a slower mechanical one — and any given file can have blocks on both. Send one without the other and fragments are all that come back. Both are imaged, then the map that binds them is reconstructed.
Usually. It becomes component work on the board itself: give us the password, leave the encryption chain unbroken, and the chips are read where they sit. Lifting the flash off and reading it away from its board is the one approach that fails.
You pay nothing for the look. What comes back is a list — the files that opened, the ones that did not, and one fixed figure to finish the job. Leave it switched off until you have that in writing.