My internal mic has become muffled?

I have a white unibody MacBook (mid 2010) and the microphone area has the same tiny holes as the 13" unibody MacBook Pro – the problem is that dust builds up in them (and it can be fairly easily seen on a white laptop), all you have to do for your mic to work properly again is just clean them.

I don't know if it's the best, safest or most effective way to do it (but quite possibly it might be the only way without disassembling the whole unit) but I used a fine needle to poke every single hole a few times and it helped greatly. Just be careful not to damage the electronics under the casing. I also used canned air and sprayed it directly on the microphone after poking with the needle.

Before cleaning, all the mic recorded were hand claps, key clicking, direct tapping on the case in the mic area and similar. After my first try the sounds were much better yet still muffled. The second time I got it just right and it works like new.

Good luck!

Edit: I would like to add that before I solved the problem physically, I tried resetting PRAM and SMC, checked the mic on another boot drive, on a Windows 7 Boot Camp partition, obviously all to no avail.

Thanks for the response - I took my MB Air back to Apple in January and they replaced the logic board (which did nothing to help the problem), so I complained enough to actually get an entire new MB Air which worked great for a couple months. The new one just started exhibiting the same problem a couple weeks ago...I just tried your cleaning solution and it's working great.

I find it amazing that a small piece of dust could stop the mic from working, and it was as simple as poking it a few times with a needle to clear it out.

Thanks very much,

my wife was getting asked why she sounded like she was speaking underwater during a Skype call.

Your simple fix with a needle did the trick ....... once we located the microphone (top left of the keyboard above the Esc key).

My wife was very grateful, so am I - I didn't take any of the credit for you most helpful tip.

Oh yes! I figured my microphone was just clogged as well. Keystrokes and tapping register fine and my Air is 3 years old. Just went with a needle and tapped on each hole a few times with a thimble and now its back to normal!

I have the same problem with my MB Air. I just got it back from repair where they replaced the "left logic board" and it's still broken. 😟

I unclogged my microphone on my macbook pro using a thin needle and it solved the issue for me 🙂

This solved my problem! 🙂