Among the sacrifices Apple had to make to fit the Pro hardware into a 13″ unibody case was the loss of the Line-In port. All MacBook models aside the 13″ MacBook Pro have two ports–one dedicated to sound input and one for sound output. With the new MacBook Pro 13″ model, Apple combined these ports into one single “audio” port which performs both functions, albeit one at a time.
True to Apple’s nature, they’ve made switching between the functions easy to do. Simply go to the Sound pane in System Preferences and change it from the dropdown box:
Simple, but annoying. The other day I had my electric guitar and wanted to amp it through my friend’s MacBook Pro 13″ but I ran into this problem: if I plugged my guitar directly in using the audio port as Line-In I couldn’t connect his laptop to a sound system–meaning I was forced to use the Mac’s built-in speakers to hear my guitar. Lame! Obviously this could have been remedied by using an external audio interface, but that’s still inconvenient.
Sigh.
by zacharytamas
06 Aug 2009 at 12:38
New blog post: Using the Line-In Port on the 13″ MacBook Pro http://bit.ly/48Ghpe
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
by Anthony Brothers
06 Aug 2009 at 12:44
I guess I’ll just have to start carrying my $10 USB sound card with my laptop to fix the problem.
by Perou
06 Aug 2009 at 12:45
I kind of hate what they’ve done. it’s not convenient, and I like to use headphones while recording to hear the music or myself, whichever.
either way… the audio port on this and others has way less quality than a usb or firewire attachment. especially if it has it’s own preamp and etc.
by Zachary Jones
06 Aug 2009 at 13:48
Perou: Yeah but when you’re on the go it’s nice to at least have something that will work, even if it’s not the best in the world.
Anthony: Yeah, it’s still an interesting move from Apple, anyway. Thanks for taking that screenshot, by the way.