Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with the iMac. I was hoping that I could keep the cable plugged in and merely unplug the headphones to play audio out of the speakers, which works with some devices. I have a pair of Beats Solo2 headphones, and while this isn’t the place to review them, one nice feature is that they have a detachable cable. It’s also difficult to plug the headphones in without getting fingerprint smudges on the screen. Since the iMac is so thin and light, you’re guaranteed to shift the screen every time you do this, and I always feel like I’m going to knock it over.
The problem with this design is that you have to reach behind the iMac every time you want to connect or disconnect headphones. This puzzling decision can only be chalked up to Apple’s Ive mind, which often prioritizes form over function.
It may be a bit too clean.Īs you probably know, all the iMac’s ports are in the back of the machine, including the headphone port. The problem with my iMac isn’t a broken part, but it’s a design flaw that’s even more annoying.Īn Inconvenient Port - The iMac with 5K Retina display is a work of art, with its huge, crisp screen and clean design. Thankfully, plugging in and removing headphones reset the switch each time thereafter on the MacBook Pro. The problem bit me a few more times, even with the new logic board. A few days later, I had a new logic board, and I was mostly good again.
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But my MacBook Pro was still covered under AppleCare, so I brought it in for service. Unfortunately, none of these worked for me. Gently insert a stick, like a cotton swab stripped of cotton or a toothpick, into the port and gently move it around to dislodge the switch.Blow compressed air into the headphone port to clean it out.Insert and remove your headphone plug a few times to reset the switch.There are a few commonly suggested remedies for a stuck switch: In System Preferences > Sound > Output, the selected output remains stuck on headphones, even when they’re unplugged.A red light from inside the headphone port.How do you know for sure that the switch is stuck? You’ll see these symptoms: This problem is not rare, as shown by the above Macworld article, as well as Apple support discussion threads here, here, here, and here. When I tried to turn the volume up, the onscreen icon indicated that they were broken, but when I plugged in headphones, everything worked fine.Īfter a bit of research, I learned about the headphone port switch, and deduced that it had become stuck. The Sound of Silence - A few months ago, my MacBook Pro’s internal speakers stopped working. That seems like a sensible design decision, but at least on a computer, it’s flawed, as my examples demonstrate. Remove the plug and the switch flips the internal speakers back on. Plug in your headphones and the switch triggers, shuts off the Mac’s internal speakers, and outputs sound to your headphones. The source of the problem, as Chris Breen once explained in Macworld, is that inside every Mac’s headphone port is a small sensor switch that detects when you insert a plug. I’ve owned dozens, maybe even hundreds, of devices with such a port, dating back to the 1980s, and have never had a problem with one, except for my two Macs: a 2011 MacBook Pro and a brand-new iMac with Retina 5K display. But they all have one common part that has given me more trouble than any other: the blasted 3.5 mm headphone port.
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