iPhone 4 mic doesn’t work during call

Posted on by Daniel Silva

Had a problem today with my wife’s iPhone. The mic wouldn’t work during phone calls, but would work in other situations, i.e. FaceTime call. Turned out that the solution was pretty simple: take out the SIM card, then put it back in. This did the trick. Shutting the phone off then on didn’t work. Closing all running apps didn’t work. Taking out the SIM then putting the SIM back in was what worked.

Update (1/25/2012): If the above doesn’t work, check out this guy’s idea, which he got from an Apple Store techie. In summary, just go to Go to Settings > General > Reset and choose “Reset network settings” on your iPhone. Brilliant.

The technical reason for this eludes me. I imagine it has something to do with AT&T and some security mechanism that suddenly didn’t recognize my wife’s specific iPhone hardware with the SIM card in that phone. But at least we got the problem solved!

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  • Pingback: Help! My iPhone mic doesn’t work! « The Old Gray Cat

  • http://www.bigfin.com/ Bigfin

    Thanks for your post. I tried taking out the SIM card on my iPhone 3, but it did not help the problem with my microphone. I also tried the “Reset network settings” suggestion, but still no relief. Looks like I am off to the Mac store today.

  • http://twitter.com/sirdanielsilva Daniel Silva

    Yeah, I don’t know yet what’s going on when this happens. It has to do AT&T though, of that I’m certain. They are the ones blocking the cell phone operation, probably for security reasons. A trip to the Apple Store, if one is nearby, is your best bet.