File Under: Another Apple Annoyance

Any of you who know me, know that a Mac lives at my house despite my feelings about them. My wife is a Mac user. In keeping with her choice, I bought her a nice MacBook Pro, last spring. Things were going along fine until WoW added voice chat. I went out and bought her a decent headset so she could chat with the rest of us.

Thursday she headed off to her sister's for a weekend art convention, with out my confirming the hardware worked. That night we tried to play, her headset mic wouldn't work despite all efforts. She had to run with the built-in mic which was noisy and annoying.

She came home today and I began trouble shooting the problem. I tried the headset on my computer and it worked. I made sure all the settings were correct and the darn thing still didn't work. I plugged in my mp3 player, and that worked. Thinking there might not be enough voltage from the passive mics, I started the online research. My suspicions were confirmed, they built it with a line-in input which requires a powered device. The idea of an input requiring the feeding device have its own power is a little ridiculous on a portable device. Oh well, she now has a USB headset and I have another reason to stick with my PC.