Sat, 21 Feb 2026 21:12:46 +0000

Everything is super tiny and it's hard to probe around but most chances are that some failure in the tiny board that handles the power button is the culprit here. Power reaches all the boards, the battery controller works and happily recharges it, and the LEDs in the front bezel show the AC adapter being plugged and the battery charge status. It just won't power up.

The board that handles the power buttons has a tiny microcontroller (laser engravings too tiny to read without a magnifier), and also handles the USB port next to the power button... Which coincidentally stopped working properly a few months back: devices would get data, but no power, because a powered USB hub would make them work. More recently the USB port started failing altogether. Maybe a replacement part can be sourced.

The other option is that the flex cable would be broken in some way not visible to the naked eye. Replacing that would be fiddly because the side that attaches to the motherboard has the tiniest FFC connector and it's so stuck that I didn't dare to try to pry it open.