Why your Mac’s Phone app can’t hear you

Is it age? Obliviousness? A delayed mental unacuity from my heart surgery last November? Or could it be a Shazaam/Berenstain Bears scenario? All I know is that the first version of this article took Apple to task for not including a menu in the Phone app for macOS 26 Tahoe that, in fact, was there all along.

Or was it?1

The Phone app introduced in Tahoe for the Mac (and on iPadOS 26) made it much easier to deal with telephony across your devices. Instead of cramming phone features relayed through your iPhone into FaceTime, you can use a full-fledged Phone app. I have been a big fan of it, since I spend most of my working hours standing in front of a desktop Mac. I far prefer using my hard-wired USB headset for calls than AirPods or, gasp, holding my iPhone to my ear!2

After months of using the Phone app successfuly, I suddenly couldn’t get audio input to work. The Phone app has minimal controls and—I thought—no option to select audio input or output, which, in other apps, means the system selection rules apply.

I use several Rogue Amoeba apps and installed the latest version of SoundSource to see if that helped. Maybe there was an audio routing problem? But no: no settings were active and quitting the app didn’t change the input problem.

I can see myself talking.

Checking the Sound pane in System Settings, I could see that the correct microphone was selected for input and, crucially, showed that it registered me speaking in the “Input level” section as I tested it. I could also be heard on Zoom and Google Meet, and could record audio locally.

Clearly, something else was at work! I called up my old pal Jeff to do some testing. (He’s also a technology writer, so we trade off troubleshooting.) After trying several things, I launched FaceTime by clicking the camera icon on the Phone lozenge that appears by default in the upper-right corner of your display during a call.

Jeff still couldn’t hear me! Interesting. FaceTime’s input and output controls are ancient and mysterious. Audio and video are both controlled from the (inappropriately named) Video menu, and it turned out that my audio input was set to a screen-sharing program I no longer use. I changed it to the microphone that was set as my system default, and suddenly my voice rang out.

The ridiculous FaceTime Video menu, which contains audio settings for FaceTime and Phone (undocumented), is so long I’m showing it sideways.

“Ah ha!” I thought to myself—and said to Jeff and to editor Jason Snell—”I am a very clever chap and should document this as an article for Six Colors,” which Jason agreed to. In editing the article, Jason said, “Isn’t there a Video menu in the Phone app?” Despite my recollection that there was none, and my recent checking for such a menu, there it was on my Mac. It must have been there all along, and, Westworld-like, it didn’t look like anything to me.

In my defense: Why, why, is there a Video menu in an app called Phone that doesn’t use video?3 Apple doesn’t document this in the Phone part of its Tahoe manual And I wasn’t the only one unaware of it: Jason and Jeff didn’t know it existed either, until Jason was pushed past the Somebody Else’s Problem Field level of awareness.

I guess this is how I keep humble. Despite decades of using a Mac, I can still miss a Video menu in an audio app.

No, I went back and checked 26.0 release videos and screen captures. It was there. ↩

Let us not even consider the possibility of using speakerphone mode, despite how well the iPhone handles audio input and noise cancellation. ↩

You can launch FaceTime Video calls from the Phone app, but the Phone app has no video features. ↩