jammer(six)

The other night I let our three year old watch some videos on my MacBook Pro. Since we were sitting in the living room in the midst of things, I had him wear headphones. All was well until the next day when I realized that my computer wasn’t making any sound. When I looked at the headphone jack, I noticed that there was a red LED light glowing inside. After digging around on the Apple Discussion forums, I was able to solve the problem.

In short, it seems that there’s a little switch inside the headphone jack that toggles between analog and digital sound, and it was stuck such that my computer was trying to provide optical audio output. I tried plugging and unplugging the headphones, but the red LED remained on, and my computer remained silent. I also tried to play around with the sound settings as well as the settings in the Audio MIDI utility, but the options that I needed were greyed out.

The solution that I ran across was to gently insert a toothpick into the headphone jack and wiggle it around. More specifically, work the tip of the toothpick around on the bottom of the headphone jack. In my case, it took just a second or two to jiggle the switch back to its default position, extinguishing the red LED and restoring sound to my built-in speakers.

After having been told by Apple that it would take 3-5 days to send me a replacement for my MacBook Pro power adapter that shorted out, I was thrilled when the new one showed up on our doorstep today (the very next day). That’s the good news.

The bad news is that they shipped my the 60W version instead of the 85W version. While the 60W adapter works with the MacBook Pro, it’s designed for the regular MacBook and it doesn’t really have enough charging capacity and it takes forever to charge the battery if I’m using the computer at the same time.

Unfortunately, Apple’s tech support line was closed by the time I discovered the problem. Oh well, it’s works well enough to limp along until things get straightened out.

Last night while I was busy putting together a post about minimizing debt while you’re in college, I noticed that my MacBook Pro was only charging sporadically. A short while later, the light on the “MagSafe” plugin flickered a bit and then went out.

To make a long story short, I discovered that the wire leading from the power brick to the MagSafe plug (which goes into the computer) had shorted out. As you can see from the pic below, it burned right through the wire insulation. Scary stuff. As far as I know, there’s not a recall for this (yet).

(Sorry for the crappy cell phone-quality picture.)

The good news is that my computer wasn’t damaged and the house didn’t burn down. Since I have AppleCare, I called them up to report the problem and to get a replacement. They took an incident report and then agreed to cross-ship a replacement. The bad news is that it will take 3-5 business days to arrive. I objected, as they’ve sent stuff to me overnight in the past. But this time they wouldn’t relent, saying only that 3-5 days was the best they could do.

Fortunately, my wife has a plain old MacBook, and the power adapter is compatible with my MacBook Pro, so at least I’ll be able to compute between now and when it arrives.