I haven’t had much to complain about with my new Powerbook, but one thing recently has me a bit miffed. That’s the line-in audio. By advertising this, Apple knows people will assume that you can plug in a microphone and have it work. That, it turns out, is completely untrue. It’s not a mic port, it’s a powered sound input port, and practically no microphone you buy will work with it. I tried buying a regular mic, and nothing registered. I then read that it has to be a powered mic, so I got one of those. This registered, but waaaay too quietly–at full gain, the recorded audio was almost inaudible.

Apparently, to record sound, you have to either find a powered mic with very specific specs which Apple does a good job of hiding from you, or buy an adaptor which in itself costs about $40.

Sure, Apple doesn’t outright say you can’t plug in a mic. But it’s a falsehood of omission–they know people are going to assume that’s what the audio line-in is for. And I thoroughly read through all the information I could find, including Apple’s manual, for any warning of this, and found none. In fact, the Powerbook manual reads:

You can also connect external microphones or other audio equipment to the audio line in port. The audio line in port is a stereo 3.5 mini-phono jack, which does not provide power to a connected device, so you must use self-powered peripherals.

So they’re covered on the self-powered part, but I have one of those and it still doesn’t work. I don’t see any specs about what type of powered mic is necessary, or any other specs on this. If they exist, they are well-hidden.

Bad form, Apple.

Update: Before I posted this, I found a solution–a very messy kludge, but it works: if I plug my powered external mic into my digital video recorder and then plug the sound out from the camera to the Powerbook’s line-in port, it works. As I said, messy, but at least I won’t have to buy an expensive adaptor.