Apple may reduce the performance of the 3nm A17 Pro processor due to massive overheating of the iPhone 15 Pro::The problem of overheating of iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max smartphones is becoming widespread. It is possible that Apple will be forced to take the unpopular step of reducing the performance of the latest 3nm A17 Pro chip.
How does something like this not show up in tests?
During tests they were holding it wrong.
Rofl… good one!
It does.
Usually engineering and R&D sees these things, but they are too scared to contradict ambitious timelines set up by management.
Or they report it to their managers, and those managers are too afraid to report it up the chain to contradict an ambitious timeline.
Or they do report it up the chain but upper management doesn’t care and gamble that users won’t notice or encounter the issue.
Or marketing. I’ve heard innuendo that at Apple, marketing has vetoes
lol hardly
Imagine engineering teams accounting for actual user behavior. No, this is on testing and the product development teams.
They just figured oh well it works well in Cupertino. They omitted the fact that Cupertino doesn’t get super hot, ever.
oof i can’t imagine using it in my country where it’s 30 degrees celcius and above on average everyday.
oof i can’t imagine using it in
my countryApple’s home state, California where it’s3040+ degrees celcius and above on averageeverydayin summer, and Death Valley has pretty much the world record.I mean if they didn’t test it in Cali I wouldn’t know where at all…
California is a big state with lots of different climates. The bay area doesn’t typically get that hot.
I haven’t noticed a heating issue and I live in a very hot climate. So, it’s not universal.
Same here, no issues so far.
My 15 pro max is cold all the time, I haven’t played any 3d games yet though. It was cold during restore process and it’s cold when charging
Duh.
Yeah I’ve not had problems on any of my families 15 or 15 Pros, however my iPad Air 5 got hot af last night installing iOS 17 and I ended up putting it in a stand and pointing a fan at it lol
People have used it in very hot areas and it has been fine, with no overheating issues.
People have used it in very temperate areas and it has turned into a small furnace.
The controlling variable is almost certainly not ambient temperature.
I can assure you it did, they just hoped no one would notice
I could see a case made for the test units having much better heat transfer and once mass produced the silicon lottery inevitably made some chips run hotter. But those variances are not massive, so it would’ve already had to run pretty hot. IDK
When developing a product you order “process corner” chips that are primarily used for testing the memory timings (through a process called Shmoo) to make sure it is stable. The “FF” class of these chips are also useful for testing thermals as they draw the maximum power you will see with the silicon lottery. So assuming Apple did this properly they should have had a good idea of what the product temperature is at the operating temperature extremes.
Interesting, so SOP would rule that out too. I didn’t know this.
Seems they don’t test
Oh they knew. Apple is just pure scum.
It does. But what is hot to me is different than what is hot to my wife. My 11 pro gets really hot if you fast charge it.
Sheeple.
Now the 20% performance increase from last years becomes 10 and you have basically the same phone as last year. Good job to ensure people preorder.
But it uses the same connector as every other device I own, which is the biggest selling point of this year’s model. The performance gains are completely wasted because the 14 was already faster than needed for any usecase.
I honestly have no idea why iPhone users put up with those cables for so long.
Because they had to if they wanted to stick with the iPhone.
Really though, fuck Apple. This change wouldn’t have happened without the EU forcing their hand.
I do find it strange though. For the first time since the 4S I am actually interested in the iPhone and going to USB-C is a big factor in that interest.
Lightning was the biggest reason I switched to maining an Android, altho I’m v happy now that I’ve switched
Me neither, the 30-pin cable was a pain!
Seriously though, I bought many of my Lightning cables before usb-c came out, after usb-c I bought universal cables. Most Apple stuff was already USB-C so it made sense.
Dord Iphone have their version of DEX? I could see the need for power if more people use their phones as a desktop computer. I think we’re not too far away from the day where laptops will just be a screen and a dock for your phone. There is no reason to have a laptop if my phone can do 95% of what it can. I hardly use my personal computer as it is.
Why put the pressure on even selling it as a new product. Should’ve just pulled a 14s. Exact same but with usbc and made bank for another year.
It’s not the same phone, because it has USB-C. I wouldn’t have paid 600€ for an iPhone 14, but this one looks somewhat compelling to me.
Mere speculation with no sources. Or Apple could do nothing.
I’m not an Apple fan by any by any means, but what a junk article! “Apple may reduce the clock speed of the processor”? C’mon! They do plenty of shitty things to dislike them for already. We don’t need to reach for hypotheticals…
I think it speaks volumes for how stagnant phone innovation has become when their marketing campaign is centered on the metal the frame is made out of.
If this turns back into being Samsung Galaxy bombs…it’s going to be looking a lot worse if they do nothing.
Ming-Chi Kuo believes that the problem can only be solved by artificially limiting the performance of the A17 Pro chip. However, this is unlikely to have a positive impact on sales of new smartphones. Alternatively, Apple can ignore the problem, but that won’t make the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max more popular either.
This whole article is based on just one persons opinion.
this is also a guy who knows a lot about, and has been following Apple news for a long time.
He’s also been wrong a lot and we don’t need to constantly consume everything he says as fact.
The company further told Forbes that the fix, which should come with iOS 17.1, won’t result in throttled performance, which some, like Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, have said was a possibility.
“May” = some possible outcome written as the company are considering it.
You mean apple? Where did they say they are considering it?
No.
I meant the article and writing the article as if apple are considering when it’s not even true.
At what point do we add active cooling to phones?
I don’t mean that as a joke, there are some really interesting systems being developed (which are functional) that are extremely tiny that can move air with no moving parts, they’re being developed for exactly this sort of use in electronics.
So, no need for a fan that wears down, creates noise, etc.
The biggest issue would be keeping the air channel free of dust and debris, if they can figure that out, then adding a few millimetres of thickness and a small weight increase in order to accommodate future higher capability processors seems entirely acceptable.
Come to think of it, who’s to say the air needs to come from outside the phone? You could have a closed system, with air channels moving throughout the phone’s metal chassis, acting a little like a heat pump, to better distribute the heat generated in one spot across the entire phone surface area for dissipation.
Phones already use their chassis for cooling, this would just significantly increase the efficiency with no exterior changes. Hmm…
This sounds promising. Dustproof. I dont think waterproofing the air channel will be necessary. This can be used as a way to create a channel for air to pass through without compromising the waterproof seal for the phone internals. The air channel can be a pass through and offers a big benefit in cooling. If there is blockage or damaged fins(I think they are vibrating fins.), then the phone will get warm and automatically throttle. A repair will not be needed unless you want the full performance. I live in the hot desert, and active cooling would be a dream come true. Every high-end phone gets hot to the touch from using GPS or streaming outside.
Edit: Another note is that most people don’t beat up their phones with high-pressure water(dirty or clean). If that was the case, then the phones water seal would suffer or be compromised as they are water resistant to low pressure and may not seal against high pressure.
Thin and flat too!
We already have. It’s called a Nintendo Switch
move air with no moving parts
That would be a passive cooling system.
No? Passive systems don’t do anything to cool other than simply exist.
These systems use energy and are deliberately activated to influence how heat is transferred. That’s the difference of active vs passive.
This is some company’s page, but they have a pretty good demonstration of one common method
Hmm that’s interesting, how does this system use energy to move heat around then, if there are no moving parts? Not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious about this system, would you have more info or links to share?
Edit: I just saw the link from @Acters above, that’s pretty cool. I’m not sure if it qualifies as “no moving parts” given that “Inside AirJet® are tiny membranes that vibrate at ultrasonic frequency”, but I’m not gonna be hung up on a technicality, as it does seem a nice technology.
I know it’s Linus, but this is the video I first learned about piezoelectric blowers: https://youtu.be/vdD0yMS40a0?si=MrmBK_b6SbtYG5iF
It’s pretty rad. And already exists.
Thanks, pretty cool!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/vdD0yMS40a0?si=MrmBK_b6SbtYG5iF
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Bizarrely I’ve had zero issues with overheating on the 15 Pro Max, even when playing games while charging or during initial installation. Does anyone know other scenarios in which it overheats?
Same here. My 15 pro max never gets noticeably warmer than my 14 pro did, even during the initial setup, where it’s doing lots of things. It seems more likely that this is a manufacturing problem that only affects some phones, because people are reporting super hot phones, most of the time, which nobody I know has seen. The phone itself is generating the heat - the climate difference doesn’t sound like the cause.
It’s not ambient temperature. Tons of people have had no problems using it in in places like Arizona or Florida. Other people have had it turn into a small furnace in much cooler areas / indoors. There’s something else going on.
i guess when you live in a tropical country? like by default the weather is super hot so naturally phones tend to overheat easily too.
That is a valid opinion, that has happened to me with all my devices, Android and iOS.
Apparently it can heat up randomly while doing something not intensive like listening to music or even sitting in your pocket, according to two people from the WVFRM podcast
Same here, my 15 pro max is cold all the time
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That’s really such a corner-case though.
Ditto. 2 15 Pros in the house.
Lots of gaming, shooting video, and doing those things while fast charging or Qi charging. It can get warm when pushed had for a long time, but no warmer than other phones or I’ve used.
In the big mega threads I generally see a handful of people who have been getting heat warning with these scenarios, but it doesn’t feel like it’s impacting the majority of users.
Shitty sites like Facebook?
Sorry to ruin your circle jerk - The company further told Forbes that the fix, which should come with iOS 17.1, won’t result in throttled performance, which some, like Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, have said was a possibility.
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They say it is an OS bug and some app problems that are causing the overheating. If true that might help the performance if anything.
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/30/apple-iphone-15-pro-overheating-details/
less power = less performance
That’s the general tradeoff but not how it always works.
A car generally trades power for fuel consumption but things like tires being properly inflated can help with both. In the same way, sometimes inefficient software leads to both reduced performance and higher power consumption, because too much power is being directed towards unproductive use.
Oops
Presumably configuration-dependent: mine doesn’t. My son’s X gets hot enough while charging to be more likely to shut down, but not my 15 Pro.
As a software QA person, I don’t even know how you verify so many configurations, so many interactions with the physical world, so many things that can’t be automated. Then again, I understand Instagram is kind of popular
Did anyone stop to think that maybe the reason you are hearing about so many people experiencing overheating on the iPhone, is because the far larger group of people that aren’t experiencing overheating have no reason to post?
