Trackpad partly stopped functioning after tea spill?

Hi Pieter,

I just did a near-complete teardown of the 2010 MBP thanks to tea. If you follow the upper case replacement guide you can get to the point where you can see the trackpad right away just by removing the battery.

Fortunately for me (but unfortunately for you), there didn't appear to be any tea around the trackpad area. However, from my experience inside the case, there's a *chance* you may be able to partially dissassemble the trackpad and do some cleaning that may remedy or mediate the issue.

In any case I would suggest pulling it apart for cleaning just to make sure there is no other damage that can become a bigger problem later on down the road. Take a look at the attached pictures and you can see that the trackpad has screws that you may be able to remove to do some deeper cleaning. You may also benefit from the info provided in the question and answers from my own tea spill :)

Liquid Spill, Should I perform complete teardown?

Pieter-- funny story, I just an hour ago spilt tea on my trackpad and am experiencing the same issue: only double click works and it remains held in. Luckily I have a wireless so I won't need to shell out too soon. Thanks for following up your post.

Hi Guys,I dropped hot coffee on the trackpad after which it started behaving erratically ,i cleaned it and left for the day thinking it would dry up and would be fine next day,but it didn't.

So after reading on many forums i covered the trackpad with rice overnight but invain ...the trackpad still had a problem...since this was my daily use macbook i attached a usb mouse to it and disabled the trackpad in system preferences.

I used the mouse for 2-3 days and on the 4th day i just check the trackpad and it was working perfectly fine.

Its been more than a month now and the trackpad is working absolutely fine.

I've had the same problem. Someone dropped a whole lot of water over my MBP. It was fixed and worked perfectly again. But half a year later the trackpad suddenly felt very strange. The click was "soft" and i had to press the trackpad hard to make it work (at the mid-bottom it seemed fine though). A couple of weeks later, as suddenly as it came, the trackpad worked just fine (i'm talking hours where i wasn't looking)... Magic?!

I had exactly the same problem, after I accidentally droped a chai tea over the keyboard , luckily I had one of those silicone cover so it did not get too much through the keyboard. I followed the same steps as you describe in your question, in a short term everything seemed to work right, after a while the trackpad click started to fail, the day after I could not click at all.

My solution was to replace the trackpad, its a very easy procedure and fortunatelly I had a broken 13 MBP I could take the part from. Now it works as expected.

I've just had the same problem and I was getting error like the double click was there forever and the cursor couldn't move.

Trying to disassemble the battery and then the trackpad. I rub the trackpad with tissue and then decide to blowing it with a fan for a couple hours. Put it back together, power on my mac....and the trackpad was working fine. Hopefully there'll be no more issues.

So recently, I a beer tipped over and split all over my MacBook Air 2011 edition. I took it to a local store and they were somehow able to get the device to function again (Not sure how after the damage it was making an awful sound).

They said they did not see any damage to my motherboard, but the internals were very sticky. They had it for about a week and then I got it back. Seemed to be running great, expect my fans were constantly running on high. I downloaded software to allow me to control the fan system as it was pretty annoying and distracting sitting in class. Im assuming the fan system had something to do with the internal heat sensor being out of whack, because I've been monitoring the temperature of the internal devices and they appear to be normal. I don't know much about computers, but I do know enough about water and technology and that wacky things can happen after.

Seemingly believing the computer was fixed, I plugged in headphones into the headphone jack to listen to music while studying. Everything was working great until I unplugged the headphones and went to my next class.

The next time I opened the computer, my mouse was frozen in the left hand corner of the screen. I've tried many things on my own to fix it and also brought it back to the repair shop and they also can't figure it out. Everything is still working correctly- the keyboard, the keyboard backlight, an external mouse, and the trackpad even registers clicks. I am able to click on the apple logo and the drop down menu appears.

This is so weird and frustrating as I have no idea what happened. Anybody have any ideas? Could a reset work? Or should I just stick to the external mouse?

Also- is it dangerous to computer to be using an external mouse when this happens.

Note to self: liquids stay far away from electronics!!! lol

My touchpad is currently not working--few hours after water spill. ... About what transpired before the touchpad stopped working, following are the details: Assuming nothing else got damaged by water, you can open up your laptop and clean up your touchpad. If it still doesn't work, you can replace it. Otherwise, if you don't feel up to it, try to find some local computer repair shop. .. Then I "mostly closed" the MBP screen/cover and put the MBP in a big zip .