The original poster reports that shortly after setup, their new 18 Pro Max produced a brief clicking or popping sound from the speaker (either top or bottom; the poster doesn’t seem clear on this) “almost like someone was pulling out an aux cable.” This didn’t just happen once. It happened, they report, several times “during the application change and [while] playing with volume and possibly voice dictation.” But it became less frequent over time and didn’t happen at all in the few hours before the post went live.
In a later edition, they add that “loud music also sounds hoarse.”
As of this writing, there are 29 direct, undeleted, and unaltered responses to the post, and by my count, at least 21 of them say they’ve experienced the same issues. Some report positive conclusions. One says it only happened on phone calls and since updating to iOS 27.0.1 it stopped completely. Another says that going into the phone’s settings and choosing “Standard” mode instead of “Voice Isolation” resulted in “much less crackling.”
But some cases appear to be more serious. One commenter, translated from Vietnamese, complains that they “hear random clicking or crackling sounds almost every time I interact with the screen. Sometimes I even hear it the moment I tap the screen to wake it up.”
More reports about the issue have appeared on the MacRumors forum. Again, there are complaints about “crackling” sounds, “intermittent popping sounds,” a “super weak tick/pop from the earpiece speaker,” and a different, “very unpleasant” emphasis on higher frequencies compared to the iPhone 17 Pro Max. And again, too many commenters confirm that they have experienced the same problem to dismiss it as user error or a single faulty unit.
Apple has not yet made a public statement about the issue, but may fix it in a software update. Go to Settings and select General > Software update and follow the instructions to install the latest version of iOS.
