Tech writer Stephen Hackett of the site 512 Pixels noticed something odd while restoring his new iPhone 7 from iCloud—a strange, staticky hissing noise. As you can hear in the video he posted, it’s something like a cross between a Madagascar hissing cockroach and a tiny water sprinkler.
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Hackett noticed that the sound, which was “loud enough to be heard even if the iPhone is just sitting on the desk,” was worst when the iPhone performed processor-heavy tasks.
Though Hackett was quick to confine his claims to his own experience, others, including TechCrunch writer Darrell Etherington, have noticed the issue as well. Conjecture currently points to the iPhone 7’s powerful processor as the culprit—that’s roughly the part of the phone the noise is coming from.
For more on the iPhone 7, watch our video.
There’s no official word yet from Apple about the issue, but an AppleCare representative who spoke to Hackett offered him a replacement phone. That suggests this may be a scattered manufacturing defect, not a design flaw.
We’ll update this post with any further information about the issue, which we’re going to go ahead and call “Cockroachgate.”
