Mini Toslink broke inside audio jack

Title says it all. I pulled out the optical cable I use to connect my iMac to my home theater and the mini toslink adapter pulled apart. The small brass ferrule is still inside the jack and is clicked into place and all of my efforts to pull it out have been useless. So... what are my options?

As far as I can see I can either

(a) try to take it apart and get at it from the inside, but the jack my still be a closed piece and once it's apart I still may not be able to do anything and will just have a disassembled computer;

(b) take it into an Apple store for repair. I'm not sure how much this would possibly cost;

(c) get an external soundcard that can support optical audio.

If (a) is too risky then either (b) or (c) are fine and my only real concern is cost. Any thoughts?

is it flush, or is it well inside? also is the piece that's left solid, or is it layered?

at first i was thinking you could get a drill or dremmel with a very small bit for metal - drill in a bit and then pull. of course the piece may just spin with the bit. you could also try a bit of crazy glue and a paperclip.

oh, and of course, you'd proabbly want to have the mac powered off. ;P

It's well inside and it's a solid piece. I've considered the crazy glue idea, but the idea of getting crazy glue on any of the contacts makes me shy away from it.

well, the good thing about crazy glue is it's not as crazy as you'd think. if a drip got inside the jack on the metal, it would be pretty easy to scrape out, as crazy glue holds to metal about as well as brittany spears holds on to reality.

i wonder if there's a good shot of the inside of the jack on ifixit.com... might make your other option of going inside and easier choice.

edit: never mind - ifixit seems to concentrate on the mobile macs...

Yeah, the only problem is that the inside of the jack is entirely plastic save for two small metal pins. There some more metal at the end but that's past where this ferrule is sitting. I'll give the crazy glue a try.

Well, victory is mine. I used some 5 minute epoxy on the end of a small punch and it did the trick.



Now to get a better mini-toslink connector.

nice work.
unfortunately those ends are pretty much the same wether your using an adaptor for a regular toslink or a toslink-mini toslink cable.

so just be careful next time.

I don't think it has anything to do with being careful. I am always careful plugging/unplugging anything. It is either due to the fact that it requires quite a lot of pressure to get the mini-toslink to unplug and overtime this damaged the connector or it's due to a poorly constructed connector (defective).

To give you an idea, I thought that I might have wound up epoxying the punch I used to the jack because it took so much pressure to get the tip out. It's a pretty tight fit.

broken toslink mini adapter in macbook pro

How long do you wait before you attempt to remove the broken adapter after applying the epoxy glue? How do you apply the glue without touching the audio jack? Any more info is greatly appreciate it.

I used a 1/16" drill bit insert into the center of the tip of mini adapter, with twist (clockwise) and pull, I was able to fish out the metal tip from macbook pro 15. The center of the adapter was plastic with a hole for the fiber, the drill bit was able to bite on the plastic and pull it out.

The better quality one has all metal core and would never break again. I bought it from Amazon for $0.01 Amazon.com: Toslink To Optical Mini Adapter: Parts Express: Electronics