Users report iPhone 15 is overheating

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/iphone-15-overheating-issues-pro-max-xqwrj8vwz

by voisin • 3 years ago

55 63 3 years ago

thetimes.co.uk

switch0072• 3 years ago

13 was solid AIUI, 14 had and still has battery issues and 15 runs hot and possibly battery issues too?

Let’s play iPhone defect excuse bingo:

- it’s just indexing data it will be ok after a week/month.

solarmist• 3 years ago

Indexing is a bitch for battery and heat, even on macOS.

ls612• 3 years ago

My 13 Pro Max is basically perfect tbh. I won’t be upgrading until we get a complete screen iPhone with no notch or pill.

johng• 3 years ago

I have a 13 Pro Max as well and I've had no issues with it. The battery is certainly not as good as it used to be... I'd say its about about 80%. Only issue though, not even thinking about upgrading.

Edit: Battery efficiency says it's at 87%... feels about 80 though /shrug.

NikkiA• 3 years ago

"You're using it wrong, it's designed to be used within an Apple™ brand Reality Bubble™, which naturally run cooler than the ambient temperature"

CountGeek• 3 years ago

Indexing what - photos?

sigilis• 3 years ago

It needs to identify each dog in your photos library to put them in their own album and figure out which dogs or people to suggest for the photo widget.

Which is to say it’s not unimaginable that photo indexing is part of it.

ThePowerOfFuet• 3 years ago

Indexing _everything_.

mort962• 3 years ago

I mean is it wrong? It seems plausible to me: we know it does a lot of stuff in the background to make photos searchable, and afaik that's not really synced. When a phone is suddenly logged into iCloud and has tens of thousands of photos available, is it that implausible that it'd run hot for a while as it analyzes photos?

Not trying to excuse anything here, if you can provide a reason to believe it's not caused by those background processes I'm completely fine with the explanation that iOS is just buggy or the hardware has heat issues. Frankly the behavior does sound pretty bad even if it's "just" the photo analysis thing, the obvious solution would be to 1) make the analysis sync with the photos, and 2) make the background processing slow enough to not notably increase heat/decrease battery life, and 3) have a place in the OS where you can see the progress and tell it to go as fast as possible. Their philosophy of hiding everything from the user doesn't seem to be working well here.

aaomidi• 3 years ago

A lot of the indexing should preferably happen when you’re sleeping and you’re plugged in.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

We didn't accept "it's just indexing" when Windows Vista laptops slowed down after fresh installs and we shouldn't accept it now on phones.

As a software developer I find it easy to come up with good explanations for things like these, but as an end user, I don't care. My photos are searchable but I don't think I've ever used that feature, I wouldn't want my phone to get hot and waste battery life indexing a picture of a funny tree I took five years ago. Do that stuff while charging overnight, and keep thermals under control while you do it. You don't need a fancy neural processor to detect that I leave my device plugged in at 100% every night, maybe make use of that obvious excess of downtime and processing power.

spacemadness• 3 years ago

Why a bunch of software folks think “eh, it’s just indexing” is reasonable fills me with dread. It’s almost if “indexing” is some excuse to do whatever the hell you want with the hardware in question. This isn’t beyond the realm of engineering to fix if it is the issue. Stop holding it wrong, folks.

achrono• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/Gw9ww

etempleton• 3 years ago

Apple has put such an emphasis on increasing the performance of their mobile chips and honestly I just don’t know why at this point. I don’t need nor want to play Resident Evil 4 Remake on my phone. I much rather have more battery life.

With that said I suspect this is probably a software issue and can probably be resolved with an update.

bentobean• 3 years ago

On the hand, I agree. But on the other hand, I love the innovation here, because it could lead us to a day where your phone is your computer. Plug it into a keyboard and monitor and get to work.

pphysch• 3 years ago

Samsung DeX?

https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/

melling• 3 years ago

Plug in? Make it all wireless.

Trencin• 3 years ago

I don't Like how the phone merges the utility of a camera,and watch. Or the ebook reader replaces the book. (Or IPod to iPhone)

I don't agree with the concept of merging of their functions, as it impacts their utility.

You lose the essence of its purpose.

And on the other hand, I think it would be a win if Apple could merge the functionality of the iPhone with the Apple Watch, but given it eat into the bottom line of competing products, would they?

Would they allow the iPhone to impact MacBook sales for example.

When Apple is able to replace the iPhone with an Apple Watch, I think that is a win for utility.

mstipetic• 3 years ago

I think we’re already there, but Apple is afraid to pull the plug on this as it would cannibalise so much of their other products

8fingerlouie• 3 years ago

I'm still waiting for the day when my phone just "slots" into a dock on my desktop, and all the apps will "automagically" transform into desktop apps with keyboard/mouse shortcuts.

Not just talking scaling to whatever, or running a phone app on my laptop, but a complete "reskin" of the application for environment that is currently executing it. If we're talking Word, i want the mobile word experience on my phone, but the full blown desktop experience when docked into a monitor with keyboard/mouse.

You could even take it one step further and make the dock indicate the intended purpose, i.e. you'd have a dock in a meeting room that suggests "presentation mode" or "meeting mode" and instead of blasting your desktop to the screen/projector, it instead shows as a second presentation desktop.

Kegenek• 3 years ago

This is of course just my opinion but we’re moving towards a high speed interconnected world- 5G, (6G?), peer to peer internet, starlink (eh?), etc.

One idea I’ve been playing around with quite a bit lately has been offloading computational data and even OS- obviously I’m not the first one on this, but I think at one point just turning our phones in to input/ receivers for some sort of cloud based OS- where basically all our phones have are an input module, battery, a strong receiver, and a storage for caching.

Then you could start making super light hardware- computers, tablets, phones all accessing on singular OS that just reformats depending on the device. And we wouldn’t need to upgrade our personal hardware anymore we could just upgrade the racks. Once everything is interconnected we wouldn’t even need cell plans either, we could just communicate through the existing cloud devices.

Anyway, that would be cool.

pjmlp2• 3 years ago

Samsung DEX and Windows Phone Continuum.

The market has already spoken.

kylehotchkiss• 3 years ago

Agreed that this is probably a software fix. It seems like it jumps to using the performance cores too readily.

Roark66• 3 years ago

Because they _really_ want the next gen to be able to run big LLMs locally. Or an alternative argument, they need it as a powerful companion to their Vr "stuff". Although I'm in favour of the first option. Why? I think running LLMs locally may be seen as a big differentiator of their devices. What else can apple do that makes their phones do more than competition?

It's like with their laptops. I briefly considered buying their laptop with M2 ultra just for the amount of ram it makes available for ML/AI (until, I saw the price in Europe that is).

citrin_ru• 3 years ago

Software easily would take all gains in hardware performance. I did not measure in seconds but I have a strong impression that an app (a ticket booking service, nothing which should require a powerful CPU) become considerably slower in the last couple years. So phones have to become faster and faster just to keep the same user experience in the face of increasing software bloat.

_Algernon_• 3 years ago

On the other hand, the constant increase in processing power also enables lazy developers to continue being lazy.

ChrisRR• 3 years ago

I'm an embedded engineer and I'm always surprised at how slow software is. I bought a new laptop that had Windows 11 pre-installed, SSD, all the bells and whistles. Just loading up it takes 5GB of RAM, eats my CPU trying to index files and still can't find the files I want faster than a brute force search.

What does Windows really do now more than my Windows 95 PC? It connects to the network, browses files and can load a web browser. Why does it need to be so bloated just to sit there ready to load a web browser

kaba02• 3 years ago

Increased performance in case of this architecture style actually contributes to better battery life. The faster any one operation can finish, the faster the whole core can go back to sleep - remember, just idling has a very significant energy drain.

Lord-Jobo• 3 years ago

It's supposed to, but current reports indicate that battery life is the same or worse with this lineup (maybe the overheating situation is to blame)

chongli• 3 years ago

That’s great as long as the software doesn’t change to fill the new performance headroom. Unfortunately, software seems to follow the same law as bureaucracy: expand until all available resources are consumed.

bestham• 3 years ago

It seems that in this case the performance per watt is essentially the same. There is no point in rushing to sleep if perf per watt is constant, you will only end up giving the chip a higher amperage and loosing even more to heat in the power delivery (internal battery resistance, traces and power supply). The slower cooler phone will perform as well and also deliver better sustained performance over time as the peak burst current of the battery decreases.

JackRumford• 3 years ago

I suspect they are trying to compete in the console market without having a console per se. AFAIK the iPhone 15 Pro has 1/3rd of the TFLOPs of the Playstation 5. They also have a smooth TV-connectivity system.

Most people who have consoles in the US already have an iPhone in their pocket. Now you just need a controller, some kind of dock for the phone, and pay off a lot of devs to make games for the platform to get the ball rolling.

This aligns with the new changes on Mac OS and IOS and the Metal API: https://developer.apple.com/metal/

JaceLightning• 3 years ago

Copying yet another Pixel feature

zdyn5• 3 years ago

Just got mine - it did run hot the first day but the next day it was fine (although I did turn off background app refresh after the first day, maybe that had something to do with it)

cozzyd• 3 years ago

iHandWarmer

polygot• 3 years ago

I have an iPhone XR, started getting very hot after I upgraded to iOS 17, especially when charging. Seems to be mostly resolved now though after I upgraded to iOS 17.0.2 but gets hot occasionally.

ablation• 3 years ago

15 Pro Max here. Ran VERY hot during first backup/data transfer and setup to the point where it actually flashed up the “too hot to charge” warning.

Since then, not a single issue with temperature and it feels cooler running than my previous 11 Pro Max.

thefourthchime• 3 years ago

Yeah, my 15 Pro was pretty hot that first day, now it's fine.

mitjam• 3 years ago

Now there is an aftermarket opportunity for heatsink cases until iPhone 16 will introduce active cooling and in-pocket sensitive throttling.

hackpelican• 3 years ago

I like covering my phones with DBrand skins. Wonder how much that would affect the thermals.

kmos17• 3 years ago

Finally upgraded after several years of skipping new models to a 15 pro, it got very hot the first day but has been perfectly fine since with heavy usage. Maybe it was initial indexing or apps installing, but no issues since. I did disable background app refresh for a bunch of apps I didn’t need it for.

My battery life is considerably improved over my previous iphone.

jug• 3 years ago

Ah once again a 15 Pro Max. See, I think it’s rumored this is due to the new Titanium design where Apple compromised the thermal system for weight.

It’s not thought to be a CPU/A17 issue and in fact their chip designers are probably a bit angry now to be drawn into poor light after all their hard work.

So with these reports, pay attention to if it’s about a Pro or not. They’re (thermally) completely different phones.

If true and complaints loud enough, I’m sure Apple will try to mitigate it with iOS updates, new throttling curves or whatever which will open its own can of worms (“here’s the inside scoop on why your 15 Pro got slow, be sure to click like!!”) OR more careful updates where the effect will be more limited and this will be a design generation lost to thermal issues.

traveler01• 3 years ago

Damn even in that Apple is copying Samsung...

hajtom• 3 years ago

As long as it doesn't want to become a Galaxy Note 7 I'm fine with that.

Users report iPhone 15 is overheating

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