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I decided to pull out the big guns and add a little alcohol to the swab. That resulted in black lines on the swab, which, along with some modest volume improvement, told me I was on the right track. Next, I pulled out a cotton swab and used it to scrub the speaker. That seemed to provide some improvement, but after several stabs and sweeps, it still wasn’t nearly as loud on a test call as I had hoped. I started by doing what I saw the Apple guy do: “stabbing” the ear speaker with the brush. In a pinch, you could use a soft-bristle toothbrush, but be very gentle with it. If you don’t have one, they’re inexpensive and handy for electronics cleaning. Thankfully, I happen to have a lens brush. Increase Call Volume by Cleaning Your iPhone’s Top Speaker If you lack a lens brush, lens blower, and microfiber cloths, you can buy a lens cleaning kit for under $10. Vacuum cleaner with brush and crevice attachments.Assemble Your Gearīefore we get started, there are a few tools you’ll want to find from around the house or purchase. So I decided to see if I could fix that old iPhone 6s with a little spring cleaning, which led to a series of cleanings that fixed some long-standing hardware issues. Calls were once again crystal clear! What made me feel even dumber is that I bought her the iPhone 8 Plus to replace an iPhone 6s that had suffered from a similar problem (on the plus side, that iPhone is now a great iOS 13 test device). I felt like a dummy when the Apple support guy pulled out a lens brush, stabbed and brushed some crud out of the top speaker (the one that looks like a line above the screen), and handed the phone back to my wife. We had tried adjusting various settings to no avail. The problem was that the volume out of the earpiece was too quiet, even at full volume. Have you ever had something professionally repaired, only to feel like an idiot when you saw how simple the actual repair was? I had that experience recently when we took my wife’s iPhone 8 Plus to the Genius Bar. #1661: Mimestream app for Gmail, auto-post WordPress headlines to Twitter and Mastodon, My Photo Stream shutting down.#1662: New Macs, 12 top OS features for 2023, vertical tabs in Web browsers, watchOS 9.5.1.#1663: Exploring the Apple Vision Pro, 12 more OS features coming in 2023, new Apple service features, Apollo shuts down.#1664: Real system requirements for OS 2023, beware Siri creating alarms instead of timers.#1665: Important OS security updates, abusive Web notifications, solve myopia with an iPhone, Self Service Repair.
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