Like during the summers in the desert. I noticed 11 Pro Max and 12 mini are struggling in the >90F degrees temperatures. I had to use my iPhone less to avoid it overheating especially with bloated apps, iOS v26.3, etc. :(
I’m afraid I cannot offer good news. My 15 does terrible in hot sunny weather. The screen needs to crank up its brightness and that means the whole phone heats up a lot. Then it has to dim the display and in the end I’m stuck with a hot phone that I can hardly read in the sun because my supposedly super bright OLED display is almost entirely dark. It’s really a bit farcical. When driving, with GPS running, if the phone’s cradle isn’t directly in front of the vent and I have AC running, the phone will often overheat to the point where it shuts down to cool off. So AC full blast it is.
It’s always been a bit surprising to me that Apple can’t do better here. I’d understand if they had designed this thing in Svalbard, but they designed this thing in the South Bay for Pete’s sakes. We have some of the sunniest and warmest weather around. How can their phone not do better in this so typical weather? I hope by the time I get my next iPhone it will fare better in sunny weather.
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Ugh. I wonder how 17 handle it.
Five minutes sitting in direct summer sun here in the Northeast US and my iPhone 16 will shut down due to overheating.
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It is a surprising issue. My iPhone 13 mini will frequently throttle and sometimes shutdown in the summer (NE USA) in an air conditioned vehicle if connected to CarPlay or charging while in direct sunlight. I realize that current phones are doing quite a bit more than older phones, but it does seem a lot more common now than in the iPhone 4/6 era.
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Very annoying even when not hot temperatures. I never had this problem with 4S and 6+. I wonder if 17e fixed this issue. I doubt it!
One of the mjor selling points for the iPhone 17 Pro was its Vapor Chamber Cooling System. Well see how well it works when some heat waves or normal summer heating arrive.
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I am sure other users live in hot areas especially southern hemisphere. So, regular 17 doesn’t have it? I was thinking of getting it to replace my 12 mini.
No, just the Pro.
But frankly, a lot of the overheating I see is related to the OLED screen cranking up its brightness and not to CPU load per se. In fact, I can get this 15 to dim down to near illegible and being piping hot even with the CPU essentially idle. All it takes is bright sunlight. So I doubt a vapor chamber or any other fancy CPU cooling shenanigans are going to help with that. They will for sure help in the sense that heavy CPU load will make the problem even worse (navigating with Maps is a good example for this), but the part of the problem that is driven by screen brightness alone will remain unaffected.
I’d gladly sacrifice OLED technology for the display tech that ran my OLDE iPhone 4s if it bought me better protection from overheating and battery drain.
(I concede my ignorance of the thermal properties of the various display technologies. My only point is that early Retina screens certainly were at least adequate for my purposes, so if newer tech brings real world thermal compromises that interfere with fairly common usage patterns, those compromises aren’t helpful to me.)
Question: what about vapor chamber cooling makes it a swindle or a stunt?
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It isn’t. It cools the CPU. Not the screen.
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I live in Prescott, AZ and I haven’t noticed a heat problem except in one usage case: on the dash of my cars (VW Jetta Wagon, Mazda Miata) when I’m using sat nav. In that case, I have one of the center vents aimed at the iPhone and let the A/C mitigate the heat. Otherwise the phone is usually in the case on my belt.
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