So my phone call audio has been crackling like a bad AM radio station for the better part of two weeks, and I finally got a fix for it. Small thing. Not exactly "man walks on moon" territory. But I've been running this blog since November 2011, through what feels like forty different iOS point releases, and I've never NOT written about a bug fix that personally annoyed me, so here we are.
Quick backstory: I caved and bought an iPhone 8 Plus the week it came out in September. I know, I know, half of tech Twitter is telling everyone to wait for the X, which isn't even up for preorder until the 27th of this month. But my 6s was down to about 45 minutes of screen-on time before it needed a charger, and I wasn't about to limp through the holidays like that. So I bought the "boring" phone. It's fine. It's a phone.
Except almost immediately after switching, calls started sounding like I was talking through a bag of chips. Crackly, kind of underwater, worst on speakerphone. My mom actually asked me twice if I was driving through a tunnel. I wasn't. I was standing in my kitchen.
Turns out I wasn't imagining it. Apple pushed iOS 11.0.3 on October 3rd and it specifically calls out two things: a fix for that crackling audio issue on iPhone 8 Plus calls, and a fix for touch responsiveness on iPhone 8 and 8 Plus screens that had been repaired with non-genuine replacement displays. The second one doesn't apply to me since my screen is stock, but the first one absolutely does, and I'll say this much: it actually worked. Updated Friday night, made a call to my brother Saturday morning, sounded normal. No more chip bag.
Here's the thing that bugs me though (pun sort of intended). This is the third or fourth year running where the brand new flagship iPhone has shipped with some kind of audio or touch bug that needed a patch within the first two weeks. I don't think that's a coincidence and I don't think it's really about Apple getting sloppier, either. I think it's just what happens when you ship hardware and software on the same September deadline every single year no matter what, and the QA window keeps getting squeezed by marketing wanting the keynote on a specific date. Nobody wants to hear "let's push it to October" when the invites already went out.
I brought this up to a friend of mine who works adjacent to hardware testing (not at Apple, I'll leave it vague) and his response was basically "yeah, that's the whole industry, welcome to consumer electronics." Which, fair, but it still feels different when it's a $799 phone versus some no-name Bluetooth speaker from a mall kiosk.
Anyway. The fix works. If you've got an 8 or 8 Plus and calls have sounded off, go update, it takes about four minutes and you don't lose anything. If your screen's been janky after a third-party repair, same update should help there too, though I'd still trust a good independent shop over Apple's own repair pricing any day of the week. That's a whole separate rant I've had brewing since my cracked 6s screen quote came back at $149 two years ago.
One more small thing while I'm in here complaining about bugs: the update notes are three sentences long, as usual, and give you zero insight into how something like an audio crackle even makes it out the door in the first place. Was it a driver issue? A hardware tolerance thing on certain manufacturing batches? I have no idea and Apple's never going to tell me. I get why — nobody wants a support forum full of "well ACTUALLY the codec sample rate" arguments — but as someone who likes knowing how stuff works, the total silence on root cause is the part that bugs me more than the bug itself.
Also, completely unrelated, but I finally used up the last of my iPhone 6s as a glorified iPod in the car this week, and I forgot how much I miss having a physical volume rocker that doesn't also control Siri if you hold it wrong. Small victories, small annoyances. That's most of tech, most days.
Update your phone if you've got one of these. That's really the whole post.