simplicity

I bought a Macbook Pro back in 2006. There is this little feature, which I assume all Macbooks have but which is rarely promoted, that does something so minor but makes so much sense that I can’t understand why no hardware company (I’m looking at you HP) hasn’t yet adopted it. It’s minuscule, but brilliant. What is it you ask? It keeps a memory of your headphones and internal speaker volume independently and it adjusts the volume based on whether the headphones are in or not. So for example, I usually have my headphones at a reasonable volume but keep my internal speakers muted. If I’m out I can plug in my headphones and not worry about turning mute off my speakers. At the same time, I can take my headphones out at any time and not worry about some large audible noise randomly escaping from my Macbook in public.

This would make sense for a lot of PC makers to implement within their hardware. It’d be really helpful at work when you remove your headphones take your laptop to a meeting but forget to turn the speaker volume on mute.