Apple’s Newest Macs Include Better Built-In Audio Devices

On older Macs, the headphone jack and the internal speakers are essentially separate ports on a single output device, and only one of these ports is allowed to be active at a time. Because of this, audio can be sent to either the built-in speakers, or the headphone jack, but not to both. As well, if anything is connected to the headphone jack, the OS shuts off the built-in speaker completely.

With these new Macs, there are actually two distinct output devices. The headphone jack and the internal speakers are separate devices, completely independent from one another.

This change means it’s possible to send different audio sources to each outputs. Below, you can see this in action, with Audio Hijack being used to route audio from iTunes to a pair of external headphones while audio from Spotify plays to the built-in speakers.

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