Here’s iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max early adopters hit with serious audio bug

The iPhone 18 Pro and its Max brother are experiencing an irritating audio bug.

Apple’s latest premium phones went on sale this week, bringing a fancy new variable aperture camera, improved battery life, and spectacular processing power to a familiar design.

However, some iPhone 18 Pro users are reporting a frustrating bug. As MacRumors reports, there’s a crackling or popping sound coming from the phone’s speaker.

The issue doesn’t seem to be consistent across the board, with some users reporting that it’s an intermittent effect that appears only in certain situations, while others state that it’s present all the time.

Those intermittent scenarios include browsing through websites, receiving notifications, accessing the keyboard, making calls over a mobile network, toggling Airplane mode, or adjusting the screen brightness quickly.

Foundry

Apple’s response

Some users report returning their iPhone 18 Pro unit, only to experience the same issue with Apple’s replacement.

What’s particularly frustrating about all this is that Apple only just rolled out iOS 27.0.1 to fix another launch bug, which was causing some iPhone 18 Pro models to restart when Face ID authentication failed.

And no, this update didn’t include a quick fix for the audio crackle issue, according to early reports.

Indeed, Apple itself has yet to acknowledge the issue. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one, as it isn’t yet apparent whether it’s a software glitch or a far more serious hardware flaw.

If it’s the former, it’ll be solved by another iOS 27 update. If the latter, we could be talking about a product recall.