The headphone jack on my MacBook Pro just stopped working. How do I fix it?

The headphone jack on my MacBook Pro stopped working. It was working fine, then just spontaneously stopped while I was using external speakers plugged into the output jack. Now, neither speakers nor 3 different headphones have sound. The internal speaker on my MacBook Pro still works.

Solution 1:

I've had similar issues and restarting coreaudio work for me. Run this in a terminal (you might be prompted for your password).

sudo pkill coreaudiod

If your curious sudo is something used to run commands as administrator (SU-DO as in super user do) and pkill sends signals to processes based on name, in this case coreaudiod, which is the name of the coreaudio daemon process. When it gets a terminate signal sent by pkill it will terminate and then macOS will restart it again.

Solution 2:

This happened to me yesterday. I tried three different headphones.

1. Go to System Preferences > Sound > Output.
2. Plug your headphones in if you haven't yet.
3. Look at the bottom where it says Output Volume and un-check the mute button.

Solution 3:

I had this same problem with my MacBook Pro 13" (mid-2009) running OS 10.6.8. Somewhere on the internet I found the answer. After plugging in the headphones and looking at the System Preferences/Sound, you may not see (in theis model) the option for Headphones, only for Internal Speaker. (Of course, you must first check that the audio port is selected for output, since this Mac has only a single port audio. Also, that the mute is not selected.) After seeing no Headphone option, put the Mac to sleep and wake it up again. Voila! Your headphones/external speakers will work.

Does anyone know what the permanent fix is for this problem?

Solution 4:

If you see red glowing light coming from it try the toothpick approach: take a toothpick and poke around in the jack until light turns off.