Something odd is happening with some new iPhone 18 Pro units. Owners have started describing a crackling or popping noise coming from the speaker, and the complaints have piled up fast across the MacRumors forums and Reddit over the past week.
People describe it differently depending on who you ask. Some call it a crackle, others a faint tick, a pop, or just random clicking that comes and goes. Most reports point to the earpiece speaker specifically, and the issue doesn’t appear limited to one model. Both the standard iPhone 18 Pro and the larger Pro Max seem to be affected.
What triggers it varies too, which makes the whole thing harder to pin down. A handful of users say they hear it constantly, almost like background static. Others only notice it during specific actions, scrolling through a website, typing on the keyboard, receiving a notification, or taking a call over cellular. Oddly specific triggers have emerged as well. Several people in the forums claim that flipping Airplane Mode on and off reliably causes the sound, and so does adjusting screen brightness too quickly.
Apple shipped iOS 27.0.1 yesterday, and for a moment it looked like perfect timing. The update fixed a separate problem where Face ID failures could cause the phone to restart unexpectedly. But nothing in the release notes mentioned speakers, and sure enough, people who installed the update say the crackling is still there. Whatever’s causing this, a software patch for Face ID clearly wasn’t it.
There’s also a more frustrating wrinkle for anyone hoping a simple exchange would fix things. Multiple owners say they returned their crackling iPhone, only to open the replacement and hear the exact same noise. That’s not a great sign if you’re hoping this is just a one-off manufacturing defect affecting a small batch of units. It at least raises the possibility that something broader is going on, whether that’s a hardware design quirk or a software issue that happens to be widespread across this generation.
Nobody outside Apple knows for certain what’s behind it yet. If it does turn out to be a software bug, there’s a reasonable chance a future iOS update quietly resolves it. If it’s hardware-related, the fix gets a lot more complicated, and probably a lot more annoying for anyone who already went through one exchange without any luck.
