Uh oh, that ain’t right.
The new iPhone surely looks hot… and also feels HOT! After a flock of iPhone users got their hands on the new iPhone 15 and 15 Pro series, they noticed that the phones may suddenly combust, with a few reports that the screen flexes out due to a swollen battery. Many believed this was due to how the chipset was engineered. However, this issue seems to not affect everyone as a contributor from Forbes did not have this problem. However, Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal did encounter it.
Due to how powerful the chipset of the new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max is, Apple is ambitious that the new chip can potentially rival big-name consoles like the XBOX One S and PlayStation 5 and the company has even partnered with popular game developers and publishers, like Ubisoft, to bring their AAA titles down to the iPhone, with most of its graphics settings intact, because the new chip now supports hardware-based ray tracing.
The A17 Pro is the first 3nm chipset to be widely manufactured. MediaTek won’t be having theirs until next year. The A17 Pro consists of a CPU that clocks over to 3.78GHz and is manufactured by TSMC, so it should be efficient since MediaTek also uses TSMC’s process; but with a clock speed this fast and a node this small, it’s no wonder why many would think the overheating issue originated from the new chipset.
However, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo contradicted that this wasn’t due to the chipset but rather due to Apple’s poor thermal induction design that didn’t flow quite well with the phones’ new titanium build. This could be true because the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus are also reported to be overheating and neither these phones use the new 3nm chip.
He also said that Apple will get on with this issue with software updates but not without a compromise. To achieve better thermal efficiency, the company will need to throttle its new chipset a bit. What they need to do is to be transparent about it.