Microphone not working on Mac
Last updated: 2026-08-22
macOS handles microphones very differently from Windows, and most of the advice you will find online is written for Windows and then relabelled. The causes here are Mac-specific.
Run the mic test above first.
The waveform moves — hardware is fine, the problem is one app or a browser permission. Start at step 3. Nothing — start at step 1.
1. Check whether your iPhone took over
This is the first thing to check on any Mac running Ventura or later, and it is the cause almost nobody suspects.
Continuity Camera lets your Mac use a nearby iPhone as a camera and microphone. It can switch automatically. Your Mac ends up listening through an iPhone sitting face-down in another room, which produces silence or a distant muffled sound depending on where the phone is.
Open System Settings → Sound → Input. If your iPhone is in the device list, that is what happened. Select your Mac’s built-in microphone or your headset instead.
To stop it recurring, on the iPhone open Settings → General → AirPlay & Continuity and turn off Continuity Camera.
The tell: the problem appears when you are near your phone and disappears when you are not.
2. Check Mic Mode in Control Center
macOS applies processing to your microphone, and the control is hidden in a place people never look.
While an app is actively using the microphone, open Control Center from the menu bar. A Mic Mode section appears, offering Standard, Voice Isolation, and Wide Spectrum. It is invisible at any other time, which is why almost nobody knows it exists.
Voice Isolation aggressively strips anything it decides is not speech. On some hardware, and with quiet microphones in particular, it removes so much that very little survives. If your voice sounds thin, distant, or cuts in and out, set it back to Standard.
This setting is remembered per app, so one application can be broken while everything else works fine.
3. Check the right input, and the input level
System Settings → Sound → Input.
Select the microphone you actually want, then speak while watching the input level meter beneath it. Two separate things live here and they are easy to confuse: the input volume slider controls gain, the input level meter shows what is arriving. A slider at zero produces a dead meter.
If the meter moves here but the test on this page does not, macOS is fine and the problem is browser permission. Continue.
4. Permissions, and why quitting matters
System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone. Enable the app you are using. For a website, that means your browser.
Now the part that is genuinely different from Windows: macOS does not apply a permission change to an already running app. Toggling the switch while Chrome is open does nothing until Chrome fully restarts.
Closing the window is not enough either. Press Cmd + Q, or right-click the Dock icon and choose Quit. Then reopen.
Browser permission is separate again. Click the padlock or the camera icon in the address bar, allow the microphone, and reload the page.
When the permission switch does nothing
Occasionally macOS’s permission database gets into a bad state: the toggle is on, the app is restarted, and access is still refused. Resetting the entry usually clears it.
Open Terminal and run:
tccutil reset MicrophoneThat resets microphone permissions for every app, so each one will ask again next time. To reset a single app instead, add its bundle ID:
tccutil reset Microphone com.google.ChromeRestart the app afterwards. This is the fix that resolves the “I already granted permission” cases.
5. Check Screen Time is not blocking it
Obscure, but real, and it produces a permission panel that simply will not respond.
System Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy → App Restrictions. If microphone changes are restricted, the Privacy settings appear normal but silently refuse to apply. Worth checking on any Mac that was set up with restrictions, including work machines.
6. AirPods and Bluetooth headsets
When AirPods are used as a microphone, macOS switches the whole connection to a low-quality mode. Audio quality drops noticeably, and that is expected behaviour rather than a fault.
If the AirPods microphone is not picked up at all, open the Bluetooth menu, disconnect them, and reconnect. On Apple Silicon Macs, AirPods occasionally connect for output only, and a reconnect resolves it.
The advice that is wrong on modern Macs
Search results are full of instructions to reset the SMC or reset NVRAM to fix audio problems.
Apple Silicon Macs, meaning every M1 and later machine, have no SMC to reset. The key combinations described do nothing at all. NVRAM is checked and reset automatically at boot when needed, so there is no manual procedure either.
If a page tells you to hold a key combination at startup on an M-series Mac, it was written for Intel hardware and never updated. Ignore it.
On Intel Macs the SMC reset does exist, but it is rarely the answer for microphone problems specifically.
Settle it in one step
Test the microphone on another machine, or another microphone on this one.
If the built-in microphone fails everywhere and your Mac is still under AppleCare, book a Genius Bar appointment rather than opening it. Built-in microphone arrays on modern MacBooks sit behind the display or speaker grille and are not a user-serviceable part.