William Reardon’s Blog

I love finding little details that show someone else’s forethought. In the my early PC laptop days, when packing up at the end of the day, I hated that music would come blasting when I pulled my headphones out before stopping my mp3 player. I’d curse myself, attempt to wake my laptop out of its half-sleep state, usually plugging my headphones back in so that my music would stop bothering everyone in earshot.

One day I noticed that never happened with my mac. I wondered why, grabbed the cable for my headset, and yanked. The volume indicator dropped to zero. I plugged them back in & the volume jumped back. I unplugged again, set the volume to low, plugged in, watched it restore, yanked, and the volume dropped back to low.

So somebody at Apple realized the volume you want with headphones isn’t necessarily the same thing you’d want without headphones. So it detects if headphones are plugged in, and sets the volume to the respective level. It’s a small thing, but it just works. In a lot of ways, that represents what I love about Apple.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 9:08 pm and is filed under nerd-ness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.