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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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