Why doesn't the mic disappear from audio devices when flipping the hardware switch?

[fw13amd]

Hi all,

Teams meeting, I talk but no one hears me. I’m not muted in Teams, nor in KDE’s audio settings.
Receive some funny jokes from Apple folks about the need to “maybe recompile the drivers”, whatever.

Until I realize I accidentally flipped the hardware switch while cleaning my laptop the day before.

Which begs the question: why isn’t the hardware switch shutting down the device entirely?

I see it among my audio devices, unmuted, with a reasonable volume set, so I’m inclined to think everything should work.

Is this something that could be worked on, on the kernel side? Or is the switch just “covering” the mic in order to only capture a constant white noise, instead of cutting power entirely?

I have a FW 13 AMD 7840U, batch 5 (pre-ordered July 2023).

Thanks!

[MJ1]

@fw13amd

Which begs the question: why isn’t the hardware switch shutting down the device entirely?

I see it among my audio devices, unmuted, with a reasonable volume set, so I’m inclined to think everything should work.

Is this something that could be worked on, on the kernel side? Or is the switch just “covering” the mic in order to only capture a constant white noise, instead of cutting power entirely?

It might be difficult or creates more problems than it solves to remove the audio input entirely.

At least for the video portion of the camera, Framework changed it specifically to not fully disconnect the camera. Mentioning that it improves how apps behave. Similar or worse app handling issues might present if the audio input was removed entirely.

@Destroya

The privacy switch behavior on the camera also uses a new mode where instead of powering off the full camera, it cuts off the image sensor power and generates a placeholder blank image in the camera controller. This results in better behavior in applications and faster privacy mode switching.

[fw13amd]

Got it, thanks.

[mxxivcz]

@fw13amd

Teams meeting, I talk but no one hears me. I’m not muted in Teams, nor in KDE’s audio settings.
Receive some funny jokes from Apple folks about the need to “maybe recompile the drivers”, whatever.

Hi, I know that such comments are uncomfortable, but I’m using Teams long enough to know that all platforms are occasionally having troubles with this awesome app.