iPhone 15: users of Pro and Pro Max models complain of overheating issues | Hacker News Reader

iPhone 15: users of Pro and Pro Max models complain of overheating issues

theguardian.com

138 pointsbeardyw193 comments

What you can do as a consumer is.. not buy new iPhones?

I don't mean as like a protest or anything. I mean just don't buy your iPhones new. They don't change much anymore, you can get caught out by this or Antennagate (or any other type of issue you get to encounter as a first mover), and the changes between years are genuinely minimal now.

The iPhone came out in 2007. The iPhone 4 came out in 2010. The leap from the original iPhone to the 4 was absolutely worth buying a new device over IMHO. A lot changed in those 3 years. Not much of anything has changed in the last 6. Not really. It's still basically the iPhone X with a couple of screen size options. Yeah the chips are faster on paper, and the photos have gone from really good to better, but it's a really incremental product these days (the notch has a notch now).

A used iPhone 13 Pro Max in great condition is about $450 these days where I am.

A new 15 Pro Max is about $1200. I get that they're not the same device, but is it really 2.1x the device that the 13 is? Am I the only person that thinks about it this way?

I get that I'm no fun at parties, you don't need to tell me. I'd probably tell you to be honest, were I invited, which I rarely am.

> Not much of anything has changed in the last 6. Not really. It's still basically the iPhone X with a couple of screen size options. Yeah the chips are faster on paper, and the photos have gone from really good to better, but it's a really incremental product these days

These kind of comments seem to be low effort because they don't really show an insight into what has changed. Of course, if you compare an iPhone from one year to the previous year, it may seem minor. But claiming confidently that not much has changed in six years is hyperbole. The improvements in camera, screen brightness, colors and many others strongly disagree with such claims.

> A used iPhone 13 Pro Max in great condition is about $450 these days where I a.m.

Of course, this could be a great alternative to buying a new phone since it's only two generations behind and is also a Pro model. It will do well for some more years (software wise) and probably need a battery replacement around that same time (depending on how it's been used till now).

> The improvements in camera, screen brightness, colors and many others strongly disagree with such claims.

I've owned an X, a 12, a 13 (after the 12 got water damage), and have ordered the 15 (but not received it yet).

With the caveat of not having used the 14 or 15 (but just looking at the specs on paper), I would have to agree with the comment you're responding to that all the changes since the X have essentially been incremental. Not only that, completely and consistently annoying UI bugs such as the one where you accidentally tap a notification when you intended to tap a UI element at the top of the screen (which I blogged about way back when: https://medium.com/p/31773fe6bbd5) have not been fixed despite the fact that my solution (adding a small input "debounce" or timeout whenever the UI changes, where inputs are ignored) would likely solve this problem. (This problem has likely annoyed YOU, even if you haven't heard about it until now! More generally, it's also a problem with websites that let you accidentally click or fat-finger on elements while they're still re-rendering and shuffling around, which my post also includes.)

Of course, that's a software problem... The hardware is largely exactly the same. There's still no way to TouchID through the screen (like Android has had for years... I absolutely cannot stand FaceID and just use an alphanumeric code to unlock with a long unlock time now), there's still no models with a foldable screen (again, like Android has had for years), and we are only JUST getting USB-C (whoop de frickin' doo... again, not an Android fan but Android has had this for years too) and ONLY (more or less) because the EU twisted Apple's arm.

(Aside: I still can't directly edit the custom spelling dictionary iOS maintains internally. Mine has a ton of garbage in it, but is just useful enough that I don't want to wipe it completely, which is the only option.)

And now with iPhones dominating the teen market with like an 88% marketshare (which is a fairly good indicator that Apple will be completely entrenched for years from now), they just don't have any incentive to take innovation risks anymore.

Why can you not stand Face ID? I love it. For me, it works pretty much 100% of the time, including situations where Touch ID would be inconvenient, like when my phone or hands are wet. (I go kayaking almost every day.)

Brushing my teeth? Can't unlock my phone.

Fresh out of the shower? Can't unlock my phone.

Phone too close? Can't unlock my phone.

Want to quickly unlock my phone while it's laying on my desk? Can't, gotta lift it, point it towards my face, then lay it back where it was.

I dunno, I have a bit of relief when I can just unlock my iPad with my finger.

When I am wearing a mask (for health reasons) it won't unlock.

I too miss the finger print unlocking.

But fingerprint unlocking didn’t work with wet fingers, like outside on a rainy day. I find that face unlocking fails less often than fingerprint unlocking ever did. (Though outside on a sunny day can be challenging.)

That’s why I want both

The problem with both (as much as I want it too) is that it reduces security because the chance of a false positive (falsely identifying you as the owner) for either/or is always higher than the chance for a false positive for each individually

I'm not OP, but I seem to naturally hold my iPhone closer to my face than the distance at which FaceID works. Either that, or the system just doesn't like my face.

FaceID works so poorly that I actually disabled it for unlocking my phone. At least when I use a passcode, I can set a grace period of one hour before the passcode is required again. If you turn on FaceID, it's always required as soon as you lock your phone.

I have an iPhone 13 Mini fwiw.

I guess when I wear sunglasses, or my CPAP, or am simply not in a position to look directly at the screen dead-on (such as when driving in the car when it's on its mount, or when I'm packing groceries and need to pay), or when I just don't want to look like a goofball staring dead-on at my phone screen, TouchID worked 100% of the time and was minimally inconvenient.

If I went kayaking every day, or just generally had wet hands a lot of the time, I could see how that could get annoying (although hand towels exist...). I wear my CPAP every night though, and didn't always feel like taking it off just to unlock my phone.

FYI, when Apple made FaceID tolerate face masks during the pandemic (probably for the same reasons it was annoying with a CPAP), they actually made it less secure (because there is no circumstance under which giving less information but expecting the same level of security will hold)

Usb-C is pretty big

In large part because with the iPhone Pro (Max) you can run 10 Gps data rates with the proper USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4 cable.

I have the 15 Pro Max. I yearly upgrade because the modems and RF electronics are substantial annual upgrades. I live in NYC with skyscrapers, subways, underground parking garages, cell tower congestion during certain parts of the day. Also, I attend busy conferences, drive on highways, and take trains. In each of these cases one can encounter weak signals. The X70 Qualcomm modem and RF electronics are a substantial upgrade over the iPhone 14 Pro Max. The iPhone 15 Pro (Max) does better in weak signal conditions than the new 2023 Samsung s23.

"The iPhone 15 Pro Max also performed better in low-signal regions, measuring speeds of 21Mbps down and 14Mbps up compared with the S23 Ultra's 17Mbps down and 9.3Mbps up in the same spot."

"The phone did well when tested at the Wi-Fi network's edge, where it peaked at 8.1Mbps down against the S23's 6.35Mbps."

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/apple-iphone-15-pro-max

> A used iPhone 13 Pro Max in great condition is about $450 these days where I a.m.

That's a pretty good deal. I got $580 from Apple for my 13PM trade-in.

> I get that they're not the same device, but is it really 2.1x the device that the 13 is?

It looks like you're using an average lifetime of 9 years for the 2.1x factor. I rarely see phones past 6 though and that's approximately how long they receive updates for.

I've also never seen a used iPhone that cheap where I am. Here a new 15 max is $1450 and a used 13 max is $1000.

Using a 6 year life:

$1000 / (6-2) = $250

$1450 / 6 = $242

So if you use a phone to the 6 year point, you are paying less for a better device, and without any unknown damage or wear. Migrating less often to a new device is also a small time saver. Even if you go to 9 years, the new iPhone is only 1.13x more.

There's one way to stop it: online culture must shift toward blaming early adopters for not waiting, instead of blaming companies for bad QA.

TotalBiscuit pushed that for game preorders, and it worked, preorders declined.

Change always starts from below, and idle BigCorp criticism has no effect if people still give their money blindly.

I mean... I absolutely do think early adopters of stuff are ridiculous and that the only reason I hop into bleeding edge tech is if I need or want to target it as a developer; and yet, I also think that a lot of these issues are ridiculous and in many cases (not sure about this current one, to be clear; but I haven't heard the cause yet) predictable (to the people who came up with / added it, not necessarily those of us in the peanut gallery that don't even know what really changed) to the point where it sometimes feels like the companies aren't doing sufficient QA at the conceptual level before pushing their product, as if what matters more is hitting some release deadline than making users happy.

I guess: I blame the premise that Apple is a publicly traded company and I blame the people who work for it for going along with the incentives it has to simultaneously market the hell out of their new devices right out of the gate while simultaneously not really thinking through the ramifications of their designs in a way commiserate to the idea that they themselves are the reason so many people insist on ravenously buying into this stuff immediately. Like, it just doesn't, to me, feel like a cultural problem: it feels like a problem with the kind of arrogant marketing and simultaneously arrogant technical stance that the overall arrogant company that is Apple likes to take with their entire public image.

> I absolutely do think early adopters of stuff are ridiculous

If there are no early adopters there are no good products.

Imagine a company launching a new product, no customer buying it and then they iterate 4 generations to make it better without any real usage feedback and still with no customers.

Early adopters get to show off their conspicuous consumption to everyone. That's the product they bought.

> online culture must shift toward blaming early adopters for not waiting

What does a user do with blame?

If the phone doesn’t work users will just return it

They are the same thing? If a majority refuses to buy new products due to bad QA it does effectively blame the company for bad QA

The point is many are blaming [BigCorp] while still consistently being early-adopters of their products.

It’s almost like the vast vast majority of people don’t buy a new phone every year - but these small incremental updates do add up over the years, and going from an X to 15 is a big change. According to statistics, people change phones every 3 years only.

You are arguing against a strawmen.

Idk what this has to do with the issue though. I mean sure wait on launch for bugs, but how often you upgrade a phone is irrelevant.

In the last 6 you get 5g, 120hz, usb c, more ram.

> but is it really 2.1x the device that the 13 is? Am I the only person that thinks about it this way?

You're not the only person that thinks about things this way, but all of you should probably stop thinking this way.

Unless you'd like to dual wield 2.1 used iPhone Pro Maxes, have exactly $1200, can never get more money, and can never spend it on anything else; the percentage of price one option is of the price of the other option is irrelevant.

What matters is what you would be giving up by spending the extra $750.

>> What you can do as a consumer is.. not buy new iPhones?

How else am I supposed to show the shallowness of my existence

Ofcourse you are right. Its a veblen good. Read up Conspicuos Consumption.

The plebs cant buy super yatches or formula 1 teams to signal Status (ie check me out, I have resourced to squander, so who do you want to hang out? with me or someone who doesnt have resources to squander?)

So they buy shit like iphones. Its within the credit card limits of the plebs with status cravings.

Veblen would say status signalling is a massive misallocation of the econimies resources, and a good technologist is one reduces economic waste. I mean get people as crazy about poor infra outside their homes or in their hospitals and schools instead this type of stuff.

You're right, of course. I try to think about it like a car. I would never buy a new car, and a 5 year old luxury car is cheaper and better than a brand new non-luxury car.

But the new ones are definitely shinier...

Plus the 5 year old car model has an established history of reported problems. A used buyer can review to make a decision based on actual reliability, vs whats essentially an unknown when new. Particularly with new model generations.

I'm with you. Still on my iPhone 11 (first iPhone I ever bought after years of running my previous Samsung phone into the ground) and zero inclination to upgrade. My wife has the same phone and will iPhone talk about her mom's new Samsung phone takes nicer pictures but like...that's it? Pictures look slightly better - to be fair she's an amateur photographer so she sees things that are far less consquential to me so I see where she's coming from - but not brand-new-$1200 device better.

This is what I've been wanting to do, but I've found the used iPhone prices to be frustratingly high.

Maybe I've been looking in the wrong places, but I can't even find a base iPhone 13 for less than ~$550. Does it really make sense to buy a 2 year old model for 30% less than the brand new version? Sure, there haven't been many meaningful improvements in the past two years, but its still two fewer years of software support.

The premium apple products get on the second hand market is consistent so you can factor your own sale of the device further down the line in to your decision making.

Antennagate was 100% bogus, they changed nothing in the phone's design and the complaints died down. The same thing with the bendgate, that one had people going to Apple stores to bend display iPhones

You could just return the phone if it's overheating. It's only been out a week or so.

people who spend $1200 every 12 months on buying the same phone, are not buying a phone.

And people who bought an iphone 15 are not people who buy a phone every 12 months.

You seem to think everyone updating to a 15 already had a 14 or other recent model? I don’t think that is a sound assumption.

I’m on an 11 and my wife has an 8. I’ll probably get a 15 next year, 1 year old second hand as I normally do.

A 2.1x modifier isn't fair though, because life cycle is also reduced by 1/3.

Also, if I have a 15 Pro Max and it overheata, I'll simply go and have it replaced under sane consumer laws.

If you've got the cash buy the Merc, etc etc Iphone. Otherwise, spend $300 on a really solid android phone and then flex on being money smart.

Review the EOL spans between apple and android though. Apple is still releasing security updates for the 5S, a 10 year old handset.

Android devices average 3-4 years before complete end of support. Maybe HN folks will go for alternate firmware, but I'm talking about manufacturer firmware for apples to apples comparison.

That $300 increases to $600+ vs holding on to a ~$500 apple handset when looking at a 5+ years timeframe.

5 years on an iphone is a long time. There'll be a few screen replacements in that story.

I've never had to replace the screen on any smartphone I've owned, of any brand, including Apple (which I've been on since the iPhone 4S), and I started with smartphones with Palm and Windows CE.

I also drop my phones all the time.

The secret? Buy a good case. It's really that simple.

Yeah been on iphones for years. Several screens and batteries. It's not a big deal - every year or two you go in a shop and say replace whatever and pay like £40 or 50. It's not like any hardwear lasts forever.

At 5 years the battery is probably kaput, but you can get a new battery for $89 installed. I just put a new battery in my iPhone 11 and it has a new lease on life. Still a great phone.

Screen replacement is what $60 bucks, done in 15 minutes while you wait? Same goes for battery.

Not at all. Screens only break if you drop your phone in a very unfortunate way.

You can also get a nice used iPhone for similar.

But what about the cool factor and showing off to your mates!?

That said I'm on a 2016 SE which is fine really.

There was a sizable leap on cameras between the 13 pro max and 14 pro max. 12MP to 48MP.

GSMArena bought two iPhone 15 Pro Max from different retailers to test the overheating issue and they were unable to replicate it.

> Lastly, we did read reports of overheating iPhones, some during fast charging. For this review, we used two iPhone 15 Pro Max units, obtained from different retailers, and neither of those became unbearably hot even after an hour of GPU stress testing. Warm, rather unpleasantly (but not concerningly) - sure, but hot - never. We know people have experienced and documented such issues, but we haven't been able to replicate those so far on our units.

They think it's a bug in iOS 17 that causes some phones to overheat.

> And since we ran the same tests on the iPhone 14 Pro Max, which last year we crowned as a phone with excellent stability, we were surprised to see that now, under iOS 17, its stability has gotten worse. That's why we think there is some software issue at play in addition to/or just contributing to the poor heat dissipation.

https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_15_pro_max-review-2618...

> GSMArena bought two iPhone 15 Pro Max from different retailers to test the overheating issue and they were unable to replicate it.

Did anyone manage to "replicate" the explosion of a Galaxy Note 7 under controlled usage? Assuming no one did, what conclusion wiuld we draw from s failure to replicate on n=2?

Failure to replicate doesn't mean that it's not an issue. They even acknowledged that it has happened to other people.

It's just another data point.

IMO, it sounds like it's a real issue, but not one that affects the majority of users.

The way you handle inconsistent failures IRL is the same way you handle it in software:

Run a hundred instances of the test. Measure the failure rate. Make the change. Re-measure.

In bash it might be a for loop running the test a hundred times, in person it might getting a hundred phones.

If you have an overheated phone as a rare event then you will at worst wasted a few hours of your life, if you have an exploding phone as a rare event then you will have your remaining of your life wasted.

MKBHD in his review mentioned a very odd instance of overheating, seemingly random and unrelated to any stressful workload. Anecdotal evidence points to iOS bugs.

https://youtu.be/cBpGq-vDr2Y?si=B0Tv1iRcd6Iran6B&t=669

There’s a couple clarifications I’d like.

Case or no case? A case keeps the heat in more.

Max settings on games with no fps cap? Optimized charging off? Limit frame rate off? Brightness level max? Auto brightness off? Background processes on? Notifications on? Reduce motion off? Location services on / precise? Wi-Fi/bluetooth/air drop on?

Standard set of social apps installed with games logged in, apps in the app switcher not closed, and email accounts set for push notifications?

I have personally observed my [phone/ipad/old iPhone/old iPad] getting so hot that I got the cannot charge due to temperature message. Updates could have changed as I could not play some of these games for very long and others may have similar complaints. I blanched my iPad case white in some areas due to heating and charging while playing.

Here’s my stress testing list:

“20 minutes till dawn” minutes

“Monster hunter now”

“Disney mirrorverse”

“Dragon raja”

“Genshin impact”

“Pathless”

I can easily overheat an iPhone 14 Pro Max by taking pictures for half an hour. Even opening the camera app and leaving it unlocked the same time is enough to greatly overheat it.

I don't know why the camera app is so power hungry, but I've replicated it with different two phones of the same model belonging to different people. It's very annoying if your use your iPhone to take pictures while traveling, because it will be drained by the afternoon, and it's something that didn't happen until the late iOS 16 versions. I haven't tried it in iOS 17 yet.

I'm not sure if this is common knowledge, but the phone is essentially taking pictures the entire time the camera app is open. Pressing the shutter button is merely selecting which photo to keep, and adding more post processing. This is done to minimize lag, which is important when trying to capture a moment, but uses a lot of power.

My main gripe with this approach has been that this causes the camera app to be incredibly RAM hungry, and my Safari tabs/Apps will reload when switching back to them. My 15 Pro seems a little better thanks to the increased memory, but the issue is still there.

Additionally, it's been relatively recently since iPhone captured at resolutions higher than 12MP, so that could explain why this phenomenon has gotten worse recently.

> Warm, rather unpleasantly (but not concerningly) - sure, but hot - never.

If only we had a standardized scale to measure and express warm vs. cold…

For the issue at hand the temperature of the phone, even on the outside, is not very relevant.

What matters are

- whether it feels uncomfortable to humans

- whether it is unsafe for humans

I think both are mostly about the amount of heat the device transfers to human skin per unit of area per second.

The temperature of the outside of the phone is _a_ factor in that, but not the only one. Thermal conductivity of the material (compared to metals, wood doesn’t feels hot in summer or cold in winter, for example) and grip strength needed to reliably hold an object play a role, too.

The problem is that the temperature you feel on your hand is not necessarily the temperature the chip is operating under. If your hand is warm that, ironically, means the heat is dissipating effectively. If it's not dissipating, then your hand will remain cool because all the heat is still on the chip.

So unless Apple gives you a way to read the chip's own temperature sensor data, what you feel holding it isn't that useful. (From a performance standpoint at least. Having a handwarmer when you didn't want a handwarmer is a different kind of problem.)

Normies care about the fact that it's uncomfortably warm to hold, not whether the CPU is hot or not.

I do think "normies" care about the CPU is hot or not, but they do so indirectly, as the phone will start throttling the CPU when it reaches a certain temperature, so the phone will start feeling laggy.

If you've ever tried to play a game on the iPhone/doing something else CPU/GPU heavy while outside in the sun on a hot day, you'll know what I mean, the performance is much worse.

> while outside in the sun on a hot day, you'll know what I mean, the performance is much worse.

Once I've had it outright shut down and show a black screen with a pretty thermometer, how's that for "performance is much worse"? ;)

(to be fair it was a spectacularly hot and sunny day, definitely in the "out of spec" range)

> If you've ever tried to play a game on the iPhone/doing something else CPU/GPU heavy while outside in the sun on a hot day

good excuse to put down the phone and enjoy the sun :)

Some of us live in places where there is more sunny & hot days than not, and your advice feels geared towards people who don't live such places ;)

I'll add that in some places sunny and hot days are sometimes better spent indoors with an aircon if possible.

Excessive heat, especially in humid regions can be daunting.

Summers in my country are getting hotter and sunnier and they've had an impact on my screen use (I hate glare!).

Absolutely, I have the 12 mini, and if my phone is plugged into my car while using maps + Spotify, it shuts down to prevent overheating.

Haha, I have exactly the same problem with my iPhone 12 Mini too, except I use Waze and YouTube Music with CarPlay, and it only happens on hot summer days, although it was in the shadow.

My hack was to put the phone so I could aim one of the AC outlets straight at it, which solved the problem.

They do Until they don’t

To echo the parent commenter:

If only things at a non-zero thermodynamic temperature gave off some sort of invisible wave that could be detected at a distance by some calibrated sensor that would give an absolute measure of the hotness of said things, without needing to worry about relative temperature differences...

It's very hard to accurately measure temperature of metallic objects. Most people don't have suitable thermometers, and even if they did they would probably use them wrong.

On the other hand, our skin is quite good at differentiating between warm and hot.

You’re not happy with our “warm - rather unpleasantly warm - hot” scale?

... but not concerningly!

When I sue full 20W charging, my iPhone 14 Pro gets warm, surprisngly so. That's a lot of power going into a small space. My wife's does the same.

Thermal Conductivity

I wonder if this is related to the use of Titanium and the poor thermal conductivity of Titanium (17 W/m-K) vs. Aluminum (210 W/m-K).

Aluminum dissipates heat more than 10x better than titanium.

https://waykenrm.com/blogs/titanium-vs-aluminum/#:~:text=All....

---

EDIT: I no longer think it's thermal conductivity due to the change in metals. See below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37705152

The amount of titanium in the iPhone is about a 1-2mm band around the outside. The inner chassis is still aluminum, and they are diffusion bonded together. While that Ti is at the primary thermal boundary for the metals in the phone, I would guess (judging from experience with both stainless steel and titanium banded phones) that most heat escapes through the glass front and back of the phone, even though they have poor conductivity.

>...most heat escapes through the glass front and back of the phone, even though they have poor conductivity.

Some does, but given glass' very poor thermal conductivity (1.38 W/(m·K)), heat dissipation by the band around the outside is probably a very significant factor in total heat dissipation.

Right, but the surface area of the glass and the proximity to the heat source more than make up for this. Just hold a phone under load and it’ll be obvious.

I’m sure Apple has much more in depth studies of the thermal characteristics of their product than I can armchair analyze, though.

There is usually a rubber case around all of the metal, so I do think that phones should be able to operate only with heat escape through the front glass alone.

> The amount of titanium in the iPhone is about a 1-2mm band around the outside.

Just to confirm, it’s almost exactly 1 mm, and the aluminum part it’s welded to adds about another millimeter: https://youtube.com/watch?v=S_W73ouKtjU&t=9m44s

(That’s for the Pro Max. The Pro could conceivably be slightly less.)

> Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple analyst at TF International Securities, said any overheating issue was probably due to “compromises” in the phone’s design as the company attempted to reduce the product’s weight.

> The iPhone Pro model has a frame made from titanium, a poor conductor of heat, which could hamper the handset’s ability to disperse heat. Previously, Apple has used stainless steel for its high-end phones.

> Previously, Apple has used stainless steel for its high-end phones.

I saw that too. I thought Apple mainly used aluminium?

Well, it's not Thermal Conductivity then.

I just looked it up.

  Stainless Steel   15 W/m-K
  Titanium          17 W/m-K
  Aluminum         210 W/m-K

Effectively, Stainless Steel & Titanium have the same thermal conductivity.

https://www.hardrok.com.au/thermal-activity-in-stainless-ste....

The issue here is users complaining that the phones get too hot to handle, which immediately eliminated conductivity. A thermal conductivity problem would've looked like the phone overheating without the outside getting too hot to handle. (picture the circuit board inside a thermos)

that's not necessarily true. Heat has to go somewhere eventually. It could be that the CPU is much hotter than the temperatures felt on the frame. but yea, if the cpu is 45 C and the frame is 40 C, you'd be right.

The interior has been aluminum, but the band around the outside has been stainless steel.

> Ceramic Shield front, Textured matte glass back and stainless steel design

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP875?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...

Interesting. 13 mini is

> Ceramic Shield front, Glass back and aluminum (sic) design

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP847?locale=en_GB

The previous generation of iPhone Pros used stainless steel instead of Titanium.

Which, at 15 W/mk, is even worse than titanium.

I wonder how much of this is just caused by the higher workloads people put on their new phones just after purchase: restoring from backup, installing/trying new apps, testing out that new GPU, Photos doing a new classification pass on the existing library, and just a generally higher than average workload for the first few weeks of ownership.

It seems like there are always a flurry of reports of issues like this on launch week, which then pretty much disappear a few weeks later.

At least one post I found online talked about a direct corelation between talking over the phone and the temperature of the back rising to about 42℃.

I think this is a software flaw as well, but it's also probably more than just "new phone, heavy workloads". I'm sure an update or two will fix the issues most people run into, these things tend to happen when phones hit the market.

Even in this case, it could be that the background utilization from “new phone” tasks is responsible for a phone call crossing some threshold.

Fresh bugs needing fresh patches seems pretty likely as well.

I kinda wish Apple and Google would work on this first-run case. It's especially bad when you buy a new phone and set it up on-the-go, only to find the battery is dead before all the apps have even installed. Not a great experience.

They could do all the app installs and setup on a virtualized iphone in the cloud, and then just copy over all the already-configured apps.

I’m not convinced that would be possible. It’s almost by definition: prod is the ultimate testing, and especially in case of such a complex product and massive user base, there is simply no way that a few won’t have issues, no matter how much testing was done by apple.

Apple sold 232 million iPhones in 2022. A .01 percent failure rate is a small city of pissed off people.

It isn't a few - every single new user who is upgrading from an old phone has a bunch of stuff to copy over. That process taking hours and leaving a hot phone with a dead battery is a really bad experience.

Some of the reports of overheating are coming from very experienced tech reviewers, and it's happening at times when the phone is being used for basic stuff, like music streaming, without any heavy work.

But without any visibility into the OS and the processes running, there is no way to know what “heavy work” may be going on, intentional or bugged.

Remember how M1 Macs used to do read/write multiple terabytes from the SSD due to a big?

Possibly that, possibly that any headline about the new phones is guaranteed clicks.

IIRC the original article about this cited case temperatures of 116f in some areas during intense benchmarking.

I thought the same. I noticed mine getting hotter than usual (compared to my 13 Pro) the first couple of days or so, it’s been fine since then.

I think it is likely this is a major cause of the issues, or at the very least is influencing the prevalence of them.

So I have the iPhone 15 Pro Max. I have for sure had a few times that it got really hot, particularly when I was restoring it and it was doing a lot of background tasks.

BUT so has every other single iPhone I have had since at least the X but I am pretty sure going farther back.

There were always moments that it got hot and I remember it would always happen when I was first setting it up. For me at least I don't think it's happening anymore than it used too.

For (likely) important context, I don't have a case on mine and I have had the Pro Max line for as long as it has existed.

I have a FineWoven case on my 15 Pro Max and, just adding to the anecdata here, have not had a single thermal issue. The only time it warmed up was during the initial data transfer. I'm pushing the phone with a lot of cinematic video recording, etc – remarkably cool.

I watched this story blossom out of a few social accounts I had to mute because it started to feel like they really wanted to get likes on 'iPhone 15 Pro Max is a disaster' type posts.

That's the tricky thing about the information environment we're in. A real issue affecting people? Or a non-issue that's being boosted and then picked up into a bigger story. Devices sometimes have issues – not debating that. Just saying, I feel like there's been very little skepticism applied here.

Same here. 15 pro max and all is smooth sailing. Worst I had it was tethered to a laptop running zoom and a pc running another zoom with the phone charging. It had to stop charging at 80% for thermal protection.

When the biggest complaints about a device are like this I feel good about the purchase.

I agree. Especially since this can make very easy clickbait headlines.

I mean it has blown up enough that even my mom texted me “your dad read an article about the iPhone 15 heating up”. Lovely.

Same here. The only time my phone gets reliably toasty is when recording a very long video at 4K 60 fps. That’s it.

Same! I noticed that with my previous iPhone also.

Related question (if you see this). I have started just cranking down the AC when I need to record something. Since annoyingly the iPhone will just stop recording with no notification. So if I have my phone mounted I may just loose some recording. Have you found a solution to this by chance?

I think the only real solution to this is to use a different, non-phone, device. Consider that the latest GoPro experiences the same problem when recording best-quality video.

Active cooling would probably work — something like a fan blowing directly at your phone — but I don’t think changing the ambient air temperature will be sufficient. (Unless the change is enormous, like recording outdoors in the winter.) Also, make sure your phone is not in a case. Of course, you could always record lower quality video. But that’s not really a solution.

I just wish it would alert me somehow without needing to see the screen or risk an alert going off while recording.

Like I get it needing to stop.

I tried the other camera route, the lower light performance was abysmal. Now I was going for a higher end webcam route that was good for YouTube. But it was shockingly bad compared to my iPhone. And I have a good amount of light, it was just that grainy look on blacks that really bothered me.

I am also just not really in a position to spend over $1k on a camera when for the most part my phone works if I could just get past one pesky little detail.

If iOS wasn't just a baby OS but instead had an activity monitor, we wouldn't play scavenger hunt, but instead just see "oh, this app or process is pinned to 100% for 5 minutes, please fix the app or apple please throttle a simple picture viewing app like instagram before it turned my brick into a stovetop". I guess we have to wait until daddy apple with their full system access can reproduce it and fix in 17.1

First of all, the phone does tell you which process is responsible for burning energy. It’s not necessarily the best but it’s there. If the phone is getting too hot to hold though, it’s not a software bug of something pinning the CPU. The OS should be thermal throttling well before that happens, and I’ve seen that happen on hot days (the phone goes from thermal throttling the CPU to a perma “this phone is too hot” blocked state until it’s cool enough). This sounds like the issue has to do with the new titanium casting that transfers heat differently and maybe isn’t tuned properly for their throttling? Not sure.

Yes I agree. A phone should never be allowed to get unpleasant to touch. Maybe apple went to generous with their temp limit, or their sensor has too much play between devices.

But also some programs shouldn't be allowed to go full blast when they are stuck in a self inflicted loop while waiting for something (instead of doing actual compute). And that is what I meant with activity monitor. If such behavior from popular software was more obvious, CPU waster could be helt accountable. Maybe you may even delegate a program to only use a single core or only e-cores. But instead, I guess, we have to settle with a thermal limit of 30°C so we won't even notice if an open app eats through our battery in the background.

> But also some programs shouldn't be allowed to go full blast when they are stuck in a self inflicted loop while waiting for something (instead of doing actual compute). And that is what I meant with activity monitor. If such behavior from popular software was more obvious, CPU waster could be helt accountable.

Have you solved the halting problem? Because that’s the only way generally to distinguish “actual” compute from stuck without forward progress. There are heuristic approaches obviously and it might be neat for Apple to try that out, but that means killing services randomly even though they may be behaving well. They do this for memory internally where you indicate expected ranges (eg when inactive it’s X and when I take out an “active” token it’s Y). Could try this for CPU consumption.

Generally though, iOS is carefully designed to not let anything run in the background except for OS services. The latter you can’t kill and former means that going to the homescreen is generally sufficient to kill whatever was misbehaving (microphone, navigation, and music let you run backgrounded but the former 2 have UI indicating this and the latter is usually audible and if any other app starts playing you stop so it’s not reliable)..

The OS does limit the resources of background tasks.

Logs are written for those events, and name specific apps, and are accessible without a developer account, on the phone at any time, without installing any additional apps or tools. I assume you’re familiar with them (unlike the tech press, who apparently as a whole is not) and consider them insufficient. What information do you find to be missing when you review them? How could they be improved?

Wait, how? This is news to me, but I'm just a heathen web developer.

Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Analytics & Improvements -> Analytics Data

(Especially the “power” logs.)

The culprit could be Instagram. Check this video out, iPhonedo measuring the phone temperature when running Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6X2ZIkYFsQ

Haven't had any issues with mine other than transfer day. Its hasn't been noticeably hot since.

Why is weight even a concern? Thinness I get because that makes a real difference in your pocket, but what's the point of reducing the weight a tiny bit?

Mostly because they insisted on making the Pro models with stainless steel instead of aluminum, which made them way heavier for no reason. The 34 gram difference between the iPhone 14 and 14 pro is very noticable in the hand.

So now they have introduced the titanium frame as a solution to their self-inflicted problem, which still isn't as light as the aluminum non-pro iPhones.

I hear plastic is cheap, light and durable too. That would solve it.

I suppose being design sensitive folks, as many Apple customers are, you could argue that plastic looks cheap. But then, most iPhones these day have a case that completely hides those stainless steel/aluminum/titanium/glass parts anyway...

> I suppose being design sensitive folks, as many Apple customers are

That trope is so very, very tired, surely on HN we can get past it?

The iPhone has over 50% market share. The vast majority of iPhone owners do not give two shits about the design of the phone. They slap it in a case anyway, and get on with their lives.

I'm a huge fan of plastic phones. Lighter, cheaper and who can tell the difference if it's in a case?

To be fair, some ways of holding the weight of the phone in one hand, e.g. resting the weight on your pinky finger along bottom edge, can cause hand injury/RSI. So weight isn’t a totally solved problem.

Does this actually cause hand injury? The bent-pinky-finger social media panic was easily defeated by realizing both of your pinkies, not just the one that holds your phone, have the same bend: it’s a knuckle.

Not the bend. Just that it hurts if you hold it like that for too long :(

Try to get one of those holders that magnetically click to your iPhone. I don't want to say the brand, but something with socket. They are an RSI-saver.

I started to use those stand cases, and I'm not going back. They Make the phone so much more thicker, but also make it so much easier handle.

I felt the same until I got a 14 Pro. I’m not sure if you’ve held one, but man these things are heavy, and I don’t even have a Max. Very noticeable compared to a 14 non-Pro.

Some of us wear lighter clothing. I've noticed my phone actively pulling down my gym shorts.

When I hold my phone while sitting or standing, there's no issue at all. But when I am lying down in bed, it becomes super annoying to hold the phone. Doesn't matter whether I am on my back or my sides.

I upgraded from an iPhone 13 Pro Max to a 15 Pro Max and even the small weight loss feels pretty significant. It’s a phone that is a lot nicer to hold.

Yeah it's interesting how an 8% change can be so perceptible. I think it's also a change in the moment of inertia contributing to that feeling. The 13PM that I traded-in for my 15PM feels like a brick in comparison.

You must have very thin pockets! In mine the difference between 8mm and 9mm is undetectable.

I have a 15 pro here for testing, it was fine yesterday, or maybe I just didn't notice it because i wasn't handling it so much, but today, it is very warm (After being idle for 30 mins, not plugged in or anything). Also, the framerate on our AR app is worse, XCode debugging navigator isn't telling me the fps, but compared to a 12 pro, it is noticeably jittery

Are you using the Instagram app? It is documented that a bug in the app in combination with iOS 17 causes phones to massively heat up while doing basically nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6X2ZIkYFsQ

No, it's clean out the box (apart from our own apps, but as I'm running through XCode,, I know the app was killed), I ran the system update and that's it

Instagram's app is buggy, yes. It visibly increases battery consumption sometimes even if it's at the background. I keep it killed because of it.

(iPhone X, iOS 16.7)

I've had that experience with some of my testing devices. For the jailbroken one, I can SSH in and see what's happening, and I recall that in at least one case it was an apple process that was sitting at 100% (I think it was springboard, but it's been a while). I killed it and it restarted automatically at a more reasonable 0-3% CPU load.

For the non-jailbroken devices, I just reboot them if I notice something is off.

This sounds like it could be the real culprit: a random process soaking up CPU time unnecessarily (and indefinitely). Has happened on many a PC I've used, especially in a corporate environment where Monday becomes a flurry of background scripts and 'silent' updates that make me wonder why my fans kicked in browsing my email.

Hopefully fixable with a patch.

Anecdote: My 15 pro max has been totally fine. It has never gotten any warmer than previous iPhones. And the FineWoven case everyone is hating on? Just fine, so far. No worse than any other case I've owned over the years.

Frankly I assume this is just the usual hyperbolic nonsense that accompanies every iPhone release. Some folks make a lot of money from all those clicks.

The jellyroll li-ion batteries invented by Sony, perfected by U.S. firms, and their IP then stolen and maximized by Chinese firms (namely CATL), are an inelegant, imperfect, and in many cases fundamentally dangerous design. And those companies have no route to improving thermal handling. It needs to change.

I can't say to what extent this is a real problem, but I can note that titanium has exceptionally poor thermal conductivity.

Ti 6-4: 6.7 W/(m·K)

Stainless steel (18-8): ~16.5 W/(m·K)

Aluminum 6061-T6: >150 W/(m·K)

As engineering alloys go, in general, titanium is at the bottom of the pack for thermal conductivity. It's possible that this might make the body of the phone a poor heatsink and lead to localized hot spots.

I'd think that the engineers at Apple have compensated for this, though. A thin internal copper or aluminum heatsink would be more than enough. But it's interesting that this titanium phone is experiencing thermal problems -- because that's the one problem you'd really expect to see with a titanium-bodied electronic device.

This is irrelevant since the majority of the internal frame is aluminum. It's really just the outer portion that you hold that is titanium.

Since titanium covers the whole back and sides, wouldn't it act as a "thermal bottleneck" regardless of the aluminum?

Titanium is only the outer band. The back is glass.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that.

I wonder if it’s anything to do with using a case. Since it’s a bit random that is.

My 12 pro max in a thin silicone case can’t even handle being wirelessly charged with magsafe on a sunny day without shutting itself down into pitifully low brightness mode.

im no apple proponent but i have used the xr,13 and 14 in full cases with no heat difference

A related issue exists with M1/M2 Pro and Max chips in their laptops. They do not overheat (unless you're in a hot environment) since they have fans and seem to have included enough cooling for these chips, but you do not get the miraculous battery life with these that you do with the lighter versions.

I guess they made the chip and RAM a lot bigger but didn't make the battery much bigger. The battery life is still decent (4-8 hours depending on work load) but not amazing.

That sounds like a bug. I have an M2 Max and battery life is excellent. Maybe not as good as my M1, but not far off. But it's a lot more powerful, so if I ask it to do resource intensive activities it can definitely drain the battery in a hurry. Running LLMs, in particular, is devastating for battery life.

You should investigate your battery life. I have an M1 Pro (14" even) and I consistently get 10-12 hours on a fairly heavy developer workflow.

Hmm, yeah I'll look. I have 64GiB of RAM so I suspect that. RAM cannot be powered down so that's all hot ceramic that must be refreshed all the time.

On a laptop it's probably some out of control javascript taking a few cores to 100%.

But on a phone it should throttle?

You'll pry my base model M1 Air from my cold dead hands. Yes it only has 8GB memory I don't care.

Battery life is very disappointing indeed, even without overheating. Updating to latest iOS 17.1 Developer Beta seems to reduce the battery drain issue in my experience so far.

Discussed a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37697382

[dupe]

Aren't these new iPhones using 3nm based CPUs? My understanding is that this would normally translate to less power draw for equivalent clock speeds, so it's interesting to hear the new iPhone is not only overheating but also has a similar battery life to the previous model and only modest performance gains.

I'm not sure. I've been using an iPhone 15 Pro, without a case, for the last week. It gets a little warm when taking lots of photos, but even during setup, it was never "hot." I remember my iPhone SE 2020 getting hotter than this.

buying brand new tech nowadays is basically signing up to be a beta user

The hottest I got my iPhone pro was charging it with the Camera app on (this would make any iPhone warm even my iPhone pro 24). I don’t think it’s a thermal conductivity I think it’s workloads.

The hottest my iPhone 13 Mini gets is charging with the Camera app on, too. I don't know if this phenomenon is unique to the newer phone.

Yea it isn’t the camera app when it isn’t in focus or laying down with the camera facing down seems to make it warm I think the autofocus is just looping.

This is some kind of bug with throttling not being applied i guess, but I'd very much like Apple to test their devices outside a constant temperature dust free office.

Right now it shuts down when it's too cold (and i mean like 0 C from personal experience, in my stopped car in winter), shuts down when it's too hot (car in summer). Keyboards fail if you dare to use them outdoors and are irreplaceable.

Can they afford to use their devices in the real world a bit before launching? Not everyone always keeps their phone at a traditional office 18 C...

I have a BMW with only CarPlay (no Android Auto). Missus has an Android. So my phone was the GPS, even when she was driving.

Because BMW only has Wireless Carplay the phone heats up like crazy. I don't understand why... my phone needs to be plugged in anyway because of the battery drain of the GPS and constant calculations of the screen. Why not utilize that as a means to send the screen data, allowing the WiFi chip to be almost turned off.

And it gets worse if you use the charging pad in the car. Charging pad + Carplay is useless.

Now she has an iPhone too and now the driver's phone is the GPS. But still, when driving, I need to put mine plugged in, under the seat to ensure it remains within temperature specs.

And because of that I forget it every time, no problem, but when I get back to the car it is always overheated.

Reminded me of when BMW put iPhone slots in their car, only for it to be quickly outmoded with an iPhone connector change.

funny enough Porsche has added an air conditioning vent for the phone charging area on some of the new modes

> Can they afford to use their devices in the real world a bit before launching?

What makes you think they don't?

The lack of usability outside California temperature ranges, for one?

Apple supports the published specs of an operating temp between 32° to 95° F (0° to 35° C). Your comment implying they don't test outside dust free "California temperatures" is simply not true.

I was one of the idiots who bought a butterfly keyboard macbook pro. Said keyboard started breaking within 2 weeks - i use the laptop on an open balcony. And it was the second iteration where they claimed they added extra sealing.

I've personally witnessed various iphones - mine and others' shutting down within your 0 to 35. Maybe when it's hot it's hotter inside, but it shut down o me in a car where it was definitely over 0 C, maybe 5-10. You'd think the temp inside the phone would be even higher than that.

So please stop explaining to me what's written on the phone or laptop. I've personally seen it isn't true.

there are many regions where the outside temp is below 32 degrees for large parts of the year

You are correct. I shouldn't have responded the way I did. As someone who worked on the iPhone it was frustrating to hear someone say what that the team did or didn't test.

Sorry, but what's even more frustrating is:

I'm walking in the street, it's -5/-10 outside (used to be normal in winter where i am) and someone collapses in front of me.

What am i supposed to call emergency services on, the nearest payphone?

They shouldn't shut down my phone when it's outside their cozy temperature range. Let me kill it while calling 112...

Edit: not to mention i have an "automotive" -40 to 125 C arm dev board on my desk. Apple doesn't need to do that for consumer use, but they could go for -20 to 40...

Totally, that would be extremely frustrating to not be able to use your phone when you need it.

Certain app seem like those that were built with web app looking got my iPhone 13 overheated when upgraded to iOS 17, still happen on 17.0.1.

You're holding it wrong.

So, whatGate is the scandal's name this time?

>>some customers claiming the titanium frame becomes too hot to hold.

They hold it wrong.

Always the same every year.

New iphone full of software and hardware issues, completely unusable according to the press.

Keeps selling like hot pancakes, no one has any real problem with theirs (and if they do they get a replacement)

FWIW, this has been one of the worst seasons for mobile phone sales in a decade. [1] It may be telling if the latest from Apple will change that or not.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/17/global-smartphone-market-to-...

In reality the only upgrade from the 14 Pro Max to this one is 3x to 5x zoom and USB-C.

And while I absolutely love USB-C, I do have a whole collection of lightning cables. Something in my way of using my iPhone(s) make pin 4 wear out insanely fast. Maybe it's because I carry it with me in the shower / hot tub.

Not sure how the USB-C variant deals with the pitting.

The button on the side and the titanium are a change, but not an upgrade. In fact, I would say the button is a downgrade from the old rocker. You could, in your pocket flip the rocker and know your phone was now on silent mode. Now you have to rely on vibration patterns.

I'll never be able to view "can flip my locked phone to silent mode while it's in my pocket" as anything but a design flaw in the first place. IMO, the greatest improvement to this area is finally being able to disable that physical action in software.

The old switch could be disabled in software under accessibility settings, and silent mode can even be bound to a Shortcut!

I have a 15 Pro, and while I like the new action button, I still do miss the old switch. There's no reason it couldn't have been added as an addition rather than a replacement.

I've never liked the accessibility way as I don't want the AssistiveTouch menu triggers either, nor do I want to toggle accessibility on and off to work around that nested problem. I just want my phone to do nothing (except the dual side long press power off fallback since there is no way around that need) when locked, not do a bunch of things to override what it's doing when unlocked.

I feel like they half assed the button implementation though. I like it in that I can at least now turn it off but that really had nothing to do with the physical approach. The great part about it being a switch means it could actually have that option to operate as that "does nothing when locked but is still a useful action button" concept but that's not actually implemented, it still either does something all the time or doesn't do anything. That's probably asking for too much customizability for the way Apple's design mindset works though.

I guess could see it still being just a switch too, where you can configure it to do something on toggle rather than read the raw state all the time, but again - probably asking too much of the way Apple likes to design things for "one size fits all" configuration options.

I expect mobile phone sales to continue to decrease due to market saturation and new phones not being sufficiently differentiable to old phones, so phone longevity increases too.

However as per your link, there is growth on the 'premium' side, of which the model in question is.

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