The overheating of the iPhone 15 Pro is a reminder: the Achilles heel of mobile phones is still heat
The overheating problem of the new iPhones is real. It doesn’t happen to everyone (to the person writing these lines, for example, not even once), but as happened with the butterfly keyboard on MacBooks, just because not e
veryone experiences it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
The wonderful iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max have suffered a skid in their commercial launch that ended up being recognized by Apple itself , which admitted that some conditions can cause the iPhone to heat up more than expected, pointing among other causes to a bug of iOS 17 and some poorly implemented third-party applications.
Although this problem, as expected, ends up being ephemeral, the lesson it should leave us with is permanent : protect your phone from heat.
Everyday habits
Overheating a phone is a danger to its operation and longevity. Especially for your battery: the more you experience excessively high temperatures, the more your long-term health will suffer. Nothing will happen for one day, maybe not for two, but if we frequently expose it to that scenario, its maximum load capacity will reduce over time.
In recent years, this issue has been a growing concern, but with the iPhone 14 Pro and the arrival of this last summer, the situation has gone much further , with a certain obsession increasingly widespread around the health of those batteries. With the iPhone 15, Apple has added a controller that allows you to display the number of charge cycles each battery takes.
If someone is concerned about this issue, it makes no sense that they would not be concerned about the effect of heat. Either due to overheating associated with a bug and applications that are not entirely well implemented (Apple targeted Instagram, Uber and Asphalt 9), or due to everyday circumstances that could be corrected.
For example, the use of wireless charging, especially Qi (not MagSafe or Qi 2), which in addition to being only 50% energy efficient, usually raises the temperature.
So is fast charging when we don’t need that extra speed , and we simply get used to using that charger even at night while we sleep, when we have no need for speed, and therefore we subject the battery to unnecessary stress.
Then there is the use of low quality chargers. Buying a charger for a couple of euros sounds tempting to get by without spending a lot of money, but it can be the best way to quickly degrade our battery, if not worse. There is no need to go to the chargers from the manufacturers themselves: just make sure that they are reliable manufacturers that comply with the USB-C standard and, if we require it, Power Delivery.
For those who are an intense gamer on their smartphone, they may experience very high temperature spikes due to the sustained use of many graphic resources. In those cases, where specific daily use raises the temperature of the phone for a while, it can make a lot of sense to use products like the Razer fan for mobile phones . Some gamepads have fans pointing directly at the battery .
Cooling is no small matter for those who spend hours playing. Not only have mobile phones aimed at these users designed the phone with strong heat dissipation in mind, they even come with their own external cooling, like the Asus ROG Phone 7 .
You don’t have to be a gamer to correct certain actions that involve heat for our smartphone. Leaving it exposed to the sun is another type of action that is easily avoidable but one that we frequently fall into, leaving it on the towel on a day at the beach, on the terrace table of a bar or on the dashboard of the car.
Nor is it about treating our smartphone as if it were a baby to take care of and take responsibility for, adding another constant worry to our brain with something that should serve to reduce them, not generate new ones. But if we can extend the life of our battery with some simple practices, why not do it. The autonomy of our smartphone in the medium and long term, and its future resale value, will thank us.