What is this small black dot?

The iPhone has a hole next to its rear camera lens. It’s easy to miss because it’s so small, and you might never have noticed it before, let alone wondered what it’s for. However, the hole actually serves a very important purpose. It is, in fact, a microphone, one of three on the device.

Another is hidden under the speaker grill on the front, and another sits on the phone’s bottom edge. The triple microphone configuration was introduced with the launch of the iPhone 5, back in 2012.

The third microphone is, naturally, there to help the phone pick up all of the sounds around you, no matter how you decide hold it. It also helps with voice recognition, which is becoming increasingly important with the rise in popularity of virtual assistants like Siri and Google Assistant.