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Repair information and guides for the long-awaited refresh of the popular MacBook Air, featuring Intel's Core i5 processors, an updated Retina Display, and numerous other changes and updates that was released on November 7th, 2018.

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Where can I buy the keyboard ZIF connector?

MacBook Air 13” Retina Display Late 2018 Battery Replacement Found in step 28 of this guide, I need the surface mount ZIF connector someone ripped off the board of a MacBook I’m repairing. Appears to be 27 pins, 13 on one side, 14 on the other, with 4 grounding/mounting tabs.

Update (03/10/2022)

@danj Here are some photos on the connector and its ribbon. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8sa04i9ki0q1x...

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As measured by my calipers, the pads seem to be approximately 0.5mm spaced, with the two rows of pins spaced at 3.5mm.

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Ouch! This might not be repairable. Can you post some good tight focused pics of the keyboard’s connector area so we can see if the pads are still present Adding images to an existing question.

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@danj Pads are all intact, I'm not near the machine right now though. If pads were damaged I'd do a trace repair. I just unfortunately can't source a connector alone, and cleaning up all those rivets is annoyingly time consuming compared to a quick connector swap.

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@synthax - While not cheap replacing the upper case would be the other option.

In any case I would need to see a nice set of tight photos to try to find the connector. Need to know the exact pin count and profile for starters and then the dimensions.

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Didn't replace the upper case. Popped the old keyboard out fairly easily. I did that by disassembling everything to get the chassis on its own, grabbing the edge of the chassis with both hands, and forcefully shoving the corner of the keyboard toward the inside with my thumbs until the first few rivets popped. After the corner was pulled up enough, it was as simple as holding the chassis down and yanking the keyboard out the backside. Sitting the new keyboard in place, you can then reapply the backlight and the screws in the center of the keyboard, and reassemble the system. Most of the keys are rock solid, with only the slightest extra deck flex on the bottom corners if you're actively looking for it. This saved me a TON of buying a replacement chassis, as the laptop was sold to me in MINT condition externally. If the slight extra flex on the corners is undesirable, you could carefully remove the old rivets with something like a PCB drill bit the size of whatever screw you're using and only plunge like 1mm (just make sure you don't drill THROUGH) and you'll be able to make the screw self-thread. Amazon has MacBook keyboard screws meant for replacing these rivets. The ones on this MacBook unfortunately don't pull out of the chassis as easily as they do on some other systems, like the older MacBooks or the Surface Book, hence the possible need to drill them out. You should only need to do a few near the bottom corners to get OEM-like keyboard feel.

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@synthax - Ouch! The connector body was ripped off! What you are seeing is the bare contacts which are part of the connector housing. At least the pads are still present as best as I can tell. But, you'll need to carefully desolder the contacts from the circuit board below and then you'll need to find the connector thats needed.

This is what it should look like:

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Sadly I can't find a source for this connector as is a special double row design

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I had thought you had lost the compression latch or something simple, not so here ;-{ Time for a new uppercase (maybe you can find a used one).

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