Chosen Solution
My Macbook Pro is not outputting any sound to the internal speakers, including system sounds like the charging sound, when nothing is connected to the headphone jack. Sound can be heard through headphones connected to the headphone jack. Only headphones show up in the sound preferences menu, and internal speakers DO NOT show up at all. There is NO red light illuminated inside the head phone jack. I am using a 15-inch 2016 Macbook Pro (2.6 GHz i7, 512 GB storage, and 16 GB RAM) running on macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 (latest version). I tried following this support article to fix the issue: Get help if the internal speakers on your Mac don’t make sound I have so far tried turning up the volume, restarting my Mac, testing sound functionality on another user account, resetting the PRAM/NVRAM, resetting the SMC, restarting the coreaudiod process in Activity Monitor, blowing into the headphone jack to get rid of dust, and inserting a toothpick into the headphone jack, but none of this has solved the issue. I included 2 relevant screenshots below, it looks like the internal speakers are not even showing up in the system information menu. I am not sure why my Macbook Pro states that headphones are always connected, unless there is a problem with a switch in the headphone jack. I would greatly appreciate any advice or tips for fixing this problem!
The headphone jack has a little switch inside. What often happens it the contact swivels away from the other contact. Using a good magnifier and light you should be able to see the contacts carefully use a toothpick to move the contact back.
Sometimes the tip part of the plug breaks off in which case you’ll need to extract the piece thats still stuck.
This just happened to me. Turns out Microsoft was running an update to Office in the background. When the update completed, audio through speakers was restored. [Headphones never stopped working.] Thanks, Microsoft…
I am going to add this just in hopes that someone stumbles on it. Since Catalina installed on my Mac, the “internal speakers” would not work. The audio option was stuck on “headphones” as if something was plugged in. Periodically, it would suddenly start working for a day or so, then resort back to headphones. For the record, I have never plugged anything into the headphones jack since the day I bought the MacBook Pro. I was confident it was not a broken jack showing a faulty insert. I spent hours on the phone with Apple. I pondered any software installed that was not native that may access the sound systems in the Mac. I had installed the Pandora app as it was easier than going to the website to listen. For the !&&* of it, I uninstalled it. The problem vanished immediately. This app was working just fine prior to the Catalina release, but something about the Pandora app is not compatible with the new Apple MacOS release. I hope others with this problem and Pandora App installed will stumble on this.
