MacBook & The “Internal Speaker” Mystery

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to watch the “Don’t Give Up On Vista” video that appeared on the home page of the New York Times website. I could see the video on my MacBook, a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running OS X v. 10.4.11, but could not hear the sound.

When I clicked on the Sound icon in the menu bar, the slider was grayed out. However when I plugged in external speakers I got sound. Now I was stumped.

First I looked in Sound Preferences. In the Output pane there was no evidence of Internal Speakers and all options were grayed out. But I knew my internal speakers were functioning because earlier I had heard the boot chime.

When I looked in the Input pane, it showed external speakers plugged into the Audio line-in port. I was able to move both the Balance and the Output sliders, check and uncheck the square next to Mute.

I unplugged the external speakers, trashed the com.apple.soundpref.plist in ~/Library/Preferences, logged out and logged back in to see if this would fix the problem. It didn’t.

Then I used an external firewire drive as the boot disk. The Sound Preference Output pane was still grayed out. No sound from the internal speakers.

After rebooting to my MacBook’s hard drive, I was going to call Apple with what I thought was a hardware problem, probably somewhere on the board. But I had some writing deadlines and did not feel like driving to the nearest Genius Bar and I was even more reluctant to ship my MacBook to Apple for repair.

Since I had spent most of the morning trying to fix my internal speakers, I decided to listen to the "Don‘t Give Up” video again. And in order to get sound, I’d have to plug in my external speakers.

This time it just so happened that the sun was behind some clouds so there was not very much light in the room. And I had to bend down close to the left side of the MacBook to plug in the speaker cable. As I did so, I peered into the port and could see a red light shining inside. That's funny. I didn’t remember seeing a red light there before: wonder what it means. Must be on the logic board close to the Line-In port, I thought. So what to do? — I’m not going to spend time taking this thing apart — I used a bent paper clip and stuck it inside the port to poke around a bit, for what reason I do not know. (Be polite and call me curious.) And I figured I had a hardware problem anyway, what more harm could I do? (Lots. Like void the warranty. . . .)

After a couple of gentle jabs producing lots of static (I don’t recommend you’re doing this by the way), the red light went out. Then I heard PC talking. I moused up to the sound icon and this time I was able to move the slider bar up to increase the sound.

Later I read that the internal speaker malfunction is caused by a faulty I/O board. Apple will replace it since my MacBook is still covered by AppleCare. But I think I’ll wait for a while to see if it happens again.

Oh. And if you’d like to see the “Don’t Give Up on Vista” video, click here.

Macworld Conference & Expo

Macworld Expo January 15-18, 2008, The Largest Ever
Excitement builds. We are two weeks away from Macworld Conference and Expo held at The Moscone Center in San Francisco. With over 400 exhibitors and a 28 percent increase in pre-show registration, it promises to be the biggest show in expo's history. Stay tuned. Or should I say iTuned? (sorry)

The show brings together Mac devotees from many fields. These include the traditional Apple strongholds of education, small business, advertising, music and publishing – the production areas of print, image, video and sound are the haunts of that 900-pound gorilla named Mac – so the audience will be largely a creative one.

Steve’s Keynote And The Hot New Rumors
Steve Jobs gives the keynote address at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, January 15th. Like most Mac devotees, I wonder what he'll announce this year. Is it hardware or software accounting for the gleam in his eye? Will he satisfy all the hot new rumors swirling about water coolers and Apple blogspots? Introduce the multi-touch MacTablet? Or iTunes movie rentals?

Feeding the rumors was the recent New York Times article (December 28) claiming that Apple has been in talks with Hollywood moguls for digital movie rental rights via iTunes as well as the leaked 1.1.3 iPhone update that supposedly fixes and expands many facets of the software, a scaled-down version of OS X, loaded onto Apple’s brisk-selling phone.

Who knows what Steve will say, but all eyes and ears will be focused on the simulcast.

Mac Base Grows Dramatically In U.S.
Although nationally both consumer and corporate computer sales were weaker than expected late this year, the Mac base is growing in the U.S.

Gartner estimates Apple's Third Quarter U.S. growth this year to be in the double-digits with shipments growing a whopping 37.2 percent compared with SQLY.

This correlates nicely with the large increase in pre-registration for Macworld Expo and the increases in Macs reported across the nation on college campuses. Take Cornell for instance. In 2000, their Mac toters made up only five percent of students and faculty; now students’ personal computers running OS X comprise 21 percent of the total. Or Princeton: 60 percent of on-campus computer sales in 2007 were Macs.

2008 Expo Highlights
In addition to the keynote address, there are pavilions for developers (presumably on The Mac Developer Boulevard), special interest and user groups. There's a Dice Career Fair for Mac professionals, a Learning Center sponsored by Macworld, a Podcast Studio, a Dream Studio for making music, even a John Lennon Bus Tour — I'd hop on that one — and, get this, a Microsoft Blogger Lounge. However, I doubt we’ll meet Bill Gates there: he gives the International CES keynote in Las Vegas January 6.

Exhibitors include old stalwarts like Adobe Systems and Quark, Alsoft, Belkin, Extensis, FileMaker, Griffin, LaCie, Marware, Newer, OtherWorld Computing and Roxio. Relative new names are also represented, Parallels, VMWare, ProjectWizards and many others supporting or accessorizing iPods and iPhones.

Noticeably absent? Gamers.