Don't panic!
Water gets in anywhere. No matter how well sealed your laptop is liquid always manages to get in. Liquid ingress will start causing damage very quickly, and it does not take much. The photo above is an example of what iLogix Computer Solutions see regularly on computer motherboards. This one in particular is from a MacBook Pro Logicboard. In this case liquid has started to cause corrosion around some capacitors which eventually introduced a short circuit that prevented the Mac from powering on. The client contacted us and told us her Mac would not boot, obviously she had no idea that this had happened. She was completely unaware that her Mac had come into contact with liquid.
The damage can happen fast. The photo above is of a Memory module taken out of an HP Laptop. The owner told us that his daughter had knocked a drink over on her laptop and it was powered off immediately and left to dry. After this, however, it would not power on.
Luckily both laptop owners came to the right place. iLogix Computer Solutions offer board level repairs meaning in the case of the Mac we took the Logicboard out and replaced the capacitors with a micro soldering technique. We then cleaned the Logicboard and returned it to the Mac. The HP required a new Memory module and some reflowing around additional areas of corrosion on the motherboard. A lot of computer shops would have replaced the logicboard on the Mac. Don't get us wrong, this is a valid repair, however by targeting the specifically effected area of the Logicboard we performed a repair that is a quarter of the price of a new Logicboard. What's more a new Logicboard may not always be new, even if it went to the Apple store you could end up with a refurb and then your faulty liquid damaged Logicboard would end up the other side of the world being reworked with a soldering iron exactly the same way we did. I guess that's one way to sell the same Logicboard twice. One moral of this story is that iLogix Computer Solutions will never be a 2 Trillion Dollar Company.
The photo above is from a MacBook Air. This photo shows part of the LCD backlight circuit. The owner spilled a drink on her Mac, she shut the Mac down and went back 30 minutes later, hit the power button and told us she saw a puff of smoke come off it. The backlight circuit sends voltage through the LVDS cable to illuminate the display. Liquid could not have hit a worse area. The liquid spill had caused a short circuit which caused the backlight fuse to blow with such force it made a hole in the Logicboard.
If you spill liquid on your Mac power it off immediately. Do not try and boot it. Contact iLogix Computer Solutions. The quicker your response the better the chances are of a cost effective repair.