Apple dropped built-in noise cancellation on the iPhone 13

Strange regression. There is a decent noise cancellation feature on the AirPods Pro, that's a first class feature instead of being buried in accessibility. It's unclear to me how much of the processing for that happens on the AirPods instead of the phone. I'm not saying that APP are a substitute for improving hearing ability on the handset (old term alert!) itself.

This doesn't seems to have any sense to me. Removing that feature won't give any hardware advantage, because if they remove the camera microphone, then the audio in videos will be worsr, and won't be any software advantage, because it's pretty improbable that affect any other part of software in any way.

Some people could say "that is done to force users to buy AirPods", but what happens to those people (like me) who use their phone without any headphones? And I won't buy any of them because I don't feel comfortable using the phone in that way.

If this ends to be true, and not that noise cancellation is on by default and you can't turn it off (a thing that can be true for an Apple product), it would be Apple laughing to their customers and not anything else.

I thought this was found to be a software bug

At the very least it’s a software removal. I hope it’s restored

People seem baffled its gone for no reason, but I have long suspected the feature caused audio artifacts. When I would FaceTime friends, if I had the phone leaning against something, portrait oriented (so charging port towards table) I would occasionally get terrible artifacts in the call. I assume it had to do with some audio filtering thing causing feedback. It was def a software issue because it showed up one day multiple devices (me and friends and partner) after a major version update.

So, maybe they took it out because the sound quality was impacted too much.

Well, did it ever work?

Possibly a patent issue?