iPhone 4 - No Sound, Bad Hardware?

worked a treat for me.

Thanks so much ZerotehRay, this fixed my problem!! I spent an hr looking at my phone trying to figure it out and thought I'd have to take it in tomorrow to get checked out. Nice to know your answer is helping even 1 yr later!

Thank you. Tried this and it worked!

Hey yall i got a quick simple fix that will work almost always. Grab yourself a can of dust off a paperclip an a pipe cleaner and use all those on your dock connector. What happens is when dust and debri build up on dock connector your iphone believes that it is plugged into a dock speaker. Usually solves problem immediately. Also make sure to clean any dock connecting devices you own regularly to prevent dust build up. I myself have an extensive history in sales of electronics @ a radioshack and it still took me about three hours before i reported on duty to fix this issue.

Dear xkata,

I Frick'n love you. I don't quite entirely know what the problem was. I was guessing that the dock connector had some kind of problem that made the phone think it was connected to a speaker.. Anyways, I first started experiencing this problem after disconnecting my phone from my computer. And after days of data mining on google, and trying more than 20 solutions (Some of them were quite ridiculous but that's what happens when you're desperate =P), Your solution finally solved my problem. At least for now.. But it's a great start!!! I hope I don't experience anymore problems in the future..

Thanks again,

Mukunku

[My phone is: Iphone 4S - iOS 5.1.1]

This is not a new thread, and has been replied to more than 4000 times, so I have no doubt I am saying the same things others have, but I will nonetheless include my own experiences here.

I just came online to this site, to check out the threads and see if there were common problems, and it seems there are. Until last night, to my knowledge, I had no trouble with speaker sound, but suddenly today when I turned the switch for speakers on nothing comes out. Tried music, tried games... nothing. I plug in the headphones and I have sound.

Now, I suspect this is a software problem or some simple little thing, and the reason I say this is because when I tested Siri the voice came out no trouble at all. Asked her how she was doing and she said she was just fine, and that resonated in the voice -- so not hardware, per se. I then checked for the sound you get when you plug in the power and got that too, so again, not hardware methinks. The last thing I did last night with my iPhone was take a call while I was out walking and I used the speaker on the headphones. Without going into detail it was a heated call and the person hung up on me, with me hitting buttons on my screen. I suspect one of one of two things, if not hardware:

1. The phone suspects the headphones are still plugged in (but then why would Siri work?).

2. I hit mute during the call and can't find a way to turn it off short of calling someone, which I should probably do.

We'll see if this helps. I can tell you that if you have the same problem and no Apple Care you're likely SOL.

Lo and behold... no sooner do I write this comment then the sound comes back. Good luck? perhaps.

I've had the problem of the iphone thinking headphone is still plugged in when it's not (checked with the volume button at the side); tried to plug and unplug headphone a few times, using q-tip or sellotaped stick to clean the headphone hole, moving the dock charger cable around gently, press the corners...

all didn't work until i aimed a vacuum (yes, a household one) at the headphone plug hole in a desperate move, and it worked! 😀 guess there's really some dust and who-know-what accumulated there that I don't want to think about... be careful the iphone don't get sucked into the vacuum though lol, and maybe it's better with the iphone switched off before attempting this~

Plugging/unplugging the cable in the jack totaly fixed my external speakers! Let's see how long it lasts, though!