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Comment by dna_polymerase | Hacker News Reader

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dna_polymerase

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

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

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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.)

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...

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

They do Until they don’t

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.

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!

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