Shift-Option-Control for 7 Seconds

Spending last weekend in a middle of nowhere, I decided to spare a couple of hours to download a large set of deep sky photos to my laptop computer (a MacBook Pro, running Windows 10 OS). There was no lone power in this middle of nowhere, so of course I did the work on a battery. Not sure in the end if this battery thing was the cause of what happened next or not.

After returning to the civilization on Sunday night, I knew there was little charge left, so plugged the power adapter and continued some other work. When all of a sudden Windows alarmed me of a very low battery level. The MacBook was not charging. Broken wall outlet - I thought and put the adapter in an adjacent socket. Nothing. Tried about 5 other outlets in the room - nothing. Of course the outlets were good. Broken cable? Or the adapter is broken? Tried another (phone) USB-C adapter and cable an no sign of life.  Plugged the original MacBook adapter to and iPad and it started charging normally.

The verdict was clear: the MacBook was not accepting power on any of the four USB-C ports. I had about 6% of juice left. Maybe this was a Windows problem - I thought and restarted the machine under MacOS.No luck. Still not charging. 5% left. 4% left...

I shut it down to keep the battery reserve just in case I found a solution.

Then of course Google is your friend (provided you have power and connectivity...). I did some searches using the iPad and came across an article on support.apple.com: How to reset the SMC on a Mac that has the Apple T2 Security Chip. Bingo!

Press and hold the right Shift key, the left Option key, and the left Control key for 7 seconds. Your Mac might turn on and show the Apple logo on its display. Keep holding those keys while you also press and hold the power button for another 7 seconds. If your Mac turned on when you first pressed the keys, it turns off at this point.

What an obvious, life-saving solution! Of course everybody knows that the MacBook not charging is the SMC issue. They everybody knows if their mac has T2 or not. And they still conserved enough power in the not-charging battery to allow this procedure to execute.

I felt almost like in a lunar lander... Weird things happening, running critically low on power reserves and about to abort the mission :) Decided to put it all down here just in case somebody is in a need to reset their SMC.