Mac os problem

[Team Orr]

Alright so i know this is a long shot as this is a robotics forum, but i know a few of you have good electronics knowledge so any ideas? This weekend after watching a DVD (used the headphone jack to listen) I am no longer able to hear anything out of the speakers. I also now have a red LED light shining through the headphone jack. Under the 'Sound' option in System Preferences, it says "Digital Out" instead of "Internal Speakers".
I've called Tech Support and they haven't been able to help me. My next option is sending my laptop back in to them for service. I'd like to see if there if there is somebody out there that has had this same issue before I lose the laptop for at least a week.
Any thoughts??
Jack

[Flippt]

Might be worth mention what model you got (Macbook pro, Air, G4 or such) and what OS.

[Jonny]

heres a tip, DON"T SEND ANYTHING BACK TO APPLE! unless you covered with applecare they'll charge you ridiculaso prices. my iphone screen broke, apple quote was something like £80 to fix it and may rake up to 2 weeks, independant company did it for me for £15 and took 3 days from posting the phone to them to receiving it again

is there anything in the headphone slot? i'd suggest giving it a good vacuum! if that doesn't help, have you tried going to system preferances-sound? there is a chance that you may have inadvertently set it so it only outputs from the headphone jack. another reason could be the speakers not being registered by mac os, this could have been caused by inadvertantly deleting or modifying system files- if this is the case put in your mac osx disc and repair your mac.

have you checked your sound card options? you could have accidentally set something on there to divert all sound to the headphone jack. have you recently installed any new operating systems (even on boot camp?) operating systems, especially windows vista have a habit of messing up mac system files and trying to replace them with windows files (which it fails to do seeing as windows uses fat32 and mac uses something else (can't remember off the top of my head) but it still manages to muck up your mac files).

do you have dear on your mac, i can't remember if this comes as standard or whether only developers get it. having a look on this may help solve the problem?

well thats all the possible problems/solutions i can think of from the top of my head, if all else fails make a back up of your stuff and completely reinstall mac osx. if that doesn't work i'd look into independent fixers who might be able to fix it (unless you have applecare, in which case go to apple. if they tried to make you pay ridiculous money go make a scene in an apple store). are you coming to rr guilford or aws 35? if you haven't been able to fix it by then i could take a look at it if you want

[Team Orr]

All fixed
yeah, i had a theory it wasn't the OS that was the problem, numerous suggestions on Mac rumors told me otherwise though. But i noticed that the Red LED went off breifly when i inserted my headphones (which are...broken) so i took a cotton bud, added a tiny drop of that wight spirit 99% alcohol stuff and cleaned the headphone socket slowly and got rid of any dust, then i gave it a vacuum and then got myself a small wooden toothpick and poked around inside the hole until i found the switch that turns on the LED, fiddled with it a bit and what do you know, the speakers which the mac "genius's" told me were broken spluttered back into life! theres still numerous other problems for me to fix (i got the laptop heavily used) but i have a feeling i can take them
Jack

[BeligerAnt]

Well done Jack, although from what you say I wouldn't be surprised if this problem mysteriously comes back.
The headphone socket has a crude switch built into it which cuts off the speakers when the headphone jack is inserted. It sounds very much as if the switch is partly broken, so it's possible it could give up completely and stop the speakers again. You could always get around it by plugging some external speakers into the headphone socket.

[EpicentrE]

Why would you use a switch to detect when a plug is in the headphone port, rather than just detecting whether current can flow through the headphone connections?

Bloody apple products *shakes fist*.

[BeligerAnt]

It's a standard feature of jack sockets. Always has been AFAIK. Pushing the plug in connects the signal to the headphones and disconnects it from the speakers. Simple and reliable until the sockets get "cost engineered" and sent to low cost (i.e. low quality) manufacturing centres...