The new iPhone 15 Pro series may be too hot for some owners. Hot means literally. Too hot to use.
According to user reviews, tests by The Wall Street Journal and social media posts by buyers in China, the U.S. and Canada, Apple's (AAPL) highest-priced new iPhone heats up in some cases to the point where it is sometimes hard to touch. Over the past year, some iPhone 14 Pro owners have reported similar overheating.
The burning of Apple's latest 15 Pro series, which typically occurs when charging and using high-intensity apps, is raising concerns that the company may need to address the overheating issue with a software update, which could affect phone performance. The high-end iPhone has become a major cash cow for Apple as global demand for smartphones declines. The company is counting on the iPhone 15, especially the Pro model, to propel its business back to growth.
Thomas Galvin, a 23-year-old owner from Cleveland, said his iPhone 15 Pro Max has been "super hot" and he's considering returning it. He said that Apple customer service told him that the heat was caused by the new phone's Settings, but even after a few days, the 15 Pro Max model was still much more serious than the iPhone 13 Pro Max at the time."
Apple declined to comment on the reported fever.
Other users on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit expressed similar complaints about the heat issue, with some mentioning that the phone had become too hot to hold.
In her review last week, Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern noted that the iPhone 15 Pro Max reached 106 degrees while charging. In further tests, the phone reached a temperature of up to 112 degrees Fahrenheit (44 degrees Celsius) while charging and playing a game, a processor-heavy task, were performed simultaneously.
The iPhone 14 Pro Max reached a similar temperature in the same test. During typical everyday use, such as texting, emailing, and browsing Instagram, both phones we tested were within normal temperature ranges.
The titanium problem?
Ming-fu Guo, an influential Apple analyst at TF International Securities, writes about the company's supply chain He attributed the heat problem to the iPhone 15 Pro's new lightweight design, which may not dissipate as well as past models. Mr. Guo said the new titanium frame used only in the Pro model is also likely to be one Titanium's poor thermal conductivity makes it difficult for mobile phones to dissipate heat.
In tests of the iPhone 15 Pro Max by DGtle, a Chinese technology information platform, the phone's temperature peaked at about 122 degrees Fahrenheit while downloading the popular mobile game Genshin Impact over a 5G network. After playing the game in HD mode for about 15 minutes, the phone reached a similar temperature.
On another popular Chinese social media platform, a user named Zengzeng complained that her new iPhone 15 Pro often overheated. She said she tried to charge her phone while chatting on wechat -- operations that usually don't put too much strain on the phone's processor -- only to receive a 'stop charging' notification because the phone was overheating.
It has long been a challenge for Apple to balance design weight with thermal performance. According to people familiar with Apple's supply plans, the company is considering using a new material for next year's iPhone printed circuit boards to make them thinner, so that overall heat dissipation is better.
Because of regulatory requirements and user habits, Apple has included a physical SIM card slot in iphones sold in some regions, such as China. People familiar with the iPhone's design said adding a slot to the already cramped interior would pose more of a challenge for cooling the device. The design isn't new this year, and products from previous years have shown it doesn't cause problems on its own, but it could also exacerbate overheating problems if combined with other factors such as the use of titanium, these people said.
"Icarus Theory"
Kyle Wiens, CEO of popular iPhone repair website iFixit, also said that one potential cause of the iPhone overheating is the new titanium case design's poor thermal conductivity.
"This is the Icarus theory," he said. "The apples flew so close to the sun that the wax on their wings began to melt."
September is typically the time when users discover flaws in the new iphones or the software that runs them. Last year, for example, some iPhone 14 owners triggered Apple's crash-detection feature while riding a roller coaster. The company later released a software update that improved the feature.
Apple is facing a slowdown in the smartphone market, so any glitches with its latest models could be a problem for the company. According to Counterpoint Research, global smartphone shipments for the full year are expected to fall 6 percent to 1.15 billion units, which would be the lowest level of smartphone shipments in a decade.
In Apple's most recent earnings report for the quarter ended July 1, iPhone sales fell 2.4% to $39.7 billion. The results were worse than analysts had expected. The iPhone still accounts for about half of Apple's sales.
Many posts on social media suggest that the problem mainly exists in the version of the iPhone 15Pro series. The more expensive Pro models are especially important to Apple because these high-end phones allow the company to keep sales rising even as it ships fewer phones.
Kuo «“¹ said Apple could fix the heating problem with a software update, but the improvement could be significant if the company did not reduce chip performance
Kuo said that if Apple can't properly resolve the issue, it could hurt the iPhone 15 Pro product cycle