Chosen Solution

The tip of a 3.5mm headphone male pin has detached itself quite good inside my headphone jack (MBP 15"). I have tried every technique including toothpicks with epoxy to tweezers to tiny drills. All of this has only resulted in the tip getting more and more stuck! I am ready to open this baby up and fix it from the inside. Would this be a good idea? Will I be able to drill open the audio output “cage” that I have observed by looking at the step-by-step guides? If this is the case - would I be able to pry out the tip from there? But before I do it - Does anybody know if I would be able to use a bluetooth headset to get audio from my MBP? Right now I can’t get any sound, even from the internal speakers since the tip is making the mac think that there are headphones attached, and therefore the speakers are offline. I am immensely grateful for any input or words of advice. Sending it to service is out of the question for monetary reasons. Thank You!

You need to approach this from the back of the port. You’ll never get it out the front. Open your machine and look at the back of the port. Sometimes you can pull the middle bracket on the back of the port out enough to allow access to the broken tip and remove it. If this fails you will need to replace the whole left I/O board. Here’s the part #922-8040: Link Here’s how to do it: MacBook Pro 15" Core 2 Duo Models A1226 and A1260 Left I/O Board Replacement

You could try to drill a tiny hole in the jack from the outside, then screw a wood screw into it, making a handle with which to pull it out.

I had similar problem with laptop Audio Output. I used back side of ballpen refill to remove the tip. I put some glue on the refill and kept it inside the audio output for a while. The tip came out along with the refill. Amol

drill a tiny hole into a jack then put in hole some power glue with needle when glue are strong pull it out what worked fore me :) :)

Mine also broke and after reading different reviews I have just tried using the Q-tip (cotton bud) method. By cutting off the end of qtip, squeezing a couple drops of super glue down the end of it, not too much and not enough for it to overflow. Then pushed it onto end of broken jack (good idea to practice first with no superglue). Push qtip securely onto jack end, I left for no more than 5 mins, then pulled it out! I was so happy the jack end was attached, i literally screamed with joy! It may be worth trying without glue, cut end of qtip, push onto broken end as far as it will go, then pull out - good luck

I used a nice dab of KRAZY glue and in seconds it was strong enough to pull the tip out with the broken part and a dab of the glue!

I have the same problem, but I glued in a bit of a pen and on the pen part came out

FIXED (sort of). I had the same problem for 2 years and it drove me mad. (I had purchased AppleCare but they said it classed as “accidental damage” and wasn’t covered. They quoted me GBP £850 to get the jack out, ffs! i.e., they would just replace the whole logic board, as they said the audio port couldn’t be replaced on its own. So angry with Apple after this, what a waste of money. What bad service.) In the end, after 2 years of fannying around using a USB-port audio stick every time I wanted to have sound — and after trying (and failing) to use the Q-tip + superglue trick, which just got glue stuck in the port — I got so annoyed by the inconvenience that I took the logic board out and was able to drill out the broken jack from the other side. I did take pictures of the operation – I will try to find them and post them – but basically, from the inside the audio jack port is a grey plastic box surrounded by copper plates.

  1. First, I separated the copper plates from each other. (They are each connected by a thin strip of copper, so I clipped through that strip with some small wire strippers.)
  2. I then bent back the rear copper plate
  3. I then drilled through the grey box from that rear side …. and out popped the broken audio jack.
  4. I then carefully bent the rear copper plate back into position and did my best to make sure it was touching the 2 copper plates at the side again. Positives: I now have sound coming out of my speakers again! Woo! Negatives: I can get audio on my headphones by plugging them in, but it’s distorted. I guess when I drilled through, the drill bit probably scarred some of the metal contact points inside the port. But I don’t care much, because I now have audio coming out of my speakers again. :)

I had this exact issue with a Dell 9030 AIO. If you remove the motherboard, you will have access to the rear of the 3.5 mm audio jack. At this point, you can use a thin pry tool to remove rear panel on the back of the 3.5 mm jack. Once the rear panel is removed, you can push the broken audio plug out of the 3.5 mm jack. Problem solved…

I removed the inside of a bic biro pulled the inside tube out, inserted it, open end into the jack and firmly pressed and twisted it in the jack hole, a this point it will stay in place, I pulled it out and the tip of the old head phone jack came with it,