iPhone 17 Pro Max iPhone 17 Pro Max: Are the overheating issues fixed?

[lucco78]

Hi guys, I own a 16 Pro Max which, in summer, becomes unusable: it overheats and the screen gets extremely dim, making it impossible to use.
I’m not talking about leaving it under direct sunlight — just being at the beach during the day, even in the shade, is enough.

Have you noticed any improvements on the 17 Pro Max?
I’m considering upgrading for this reason alone...

 

[EugW]

Judging by the reviews, heat dissipation is noticeably improved on the 17 Pro series. It can still get quite warm though over time.

 

[BuggyGT]

Just happened to see this on Reddit yesterday

https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1nmt22g/iphone_17_pro_max_the_new_vapor_chamber_works

 

[maerz001]

Judging by the reviews, heat dissipation is noticeably improved on the 17 Pro series. It can still get quite warm though over time.

Of course it will get warm. Even warmer I would say as the aluminum dissipates heat better and the vapor chamber brings the heat faster to the surface.

 

[EugW]

Of course it will get warm. Even warmer I would say as the aluminum dissipates heat better and the vapor chamber brings the heat faster to the surface.

No not warmer. The subjective reports are that it takes longer for the shell to get warm, presumably because the heat is dissipated more evenly across the entire phone shell. However, over time it can get nearly as warm as the previous models.

 

[EugW]

Heat map of iPhone 17 Pro GPU vs iPhone 16 Pro GPU vs iPhone 17 Neural Engine for an AI workload.
So, look at the left and centre iPhones for the Apple-to-Apple comparison:

iPhone 17 - Argmax

Apple has redesigned the iPhone for the on-device AI age. In our real-world benchmarks, iPhone 17 Pro is already up to 3.1x faster than iPhone 16 Pro on iOS 26 for large Transformer model inference on the GPU with the new Neural Accelerators. Despite the fact that the Neural Engine improved only...

www.argmaxinc.com

Workload 2: Sustained Real-time Transcription

This workload requires transcribing the first 30 minutes of this YouTube video in real-time with sub-second latency using Nvidia Parakeet v3 on the Argmax Playground app. This workload is continuously dissipating heat and drawing energy from the battery at near peak compute utilization, making it an ideal benchmark for testing the new cooling system in the iPhone 17 lineup.

The results are self-evident: iPhone 17 Pro's new cooling system is highly effective in dissipating heat from this continuous heavy inference workload, even on the GPU.

 

[jbachandouris]

Don't know if it's really working or not but I got the dreaded stopped charging due to heat error. In a car. With the AC on. The work Android (old POS) has never had any troubles.

 

[EugW]

The iFixit teardown shows the battery tray which spans the width of the iPhone, and which also holds the vapour chamber. The heat is quickly and evenly transmitted to the aluminum shell, for quick heat dissipation.



In this test the 16 Pro Max shell gets to 37.8C while the SoC throttles, whereas the 17 Pro Max shell gets to 34.8C without SoC throttling.

While the 3C temperature difference doesn't seem like much, I suspect what is happening here is that even more heat is retained within the iPhone 16 Pro Max, not dissipated at the surface, and what does get to the surface is concentrated in a relatively small area. In contrast, heat in the 17 Pro Max quickly and evenly gets to the entire surface and is dissipated quickly, so the temperature rise at the surface is not as high despite giving off more heat overall. However, a case will slow heat dissipation of course.

 

[EugW]

Air throttles quickly

 

[upandown]

Can anyone tell me why my 17 Pro keeps outputting photos at 12MPs? I have 48MP set in the settings. This occurs with the Main and when I go to 2X. I don’t believe this happened with my 14 Pro..

 

[MisterSavage]

For me with heat issues the 15 Pro was terrible, the 16 Pro was much better, and the 17 Pro is drastically better.

 

[rjjacobson]

Hi guys, I own a 16 Pro Max which, in summer, becomes unusable: it overheats and the screen gets extremely dim, making it impossible to use.
I’m not talking about leaving it under direct sunlight — just being at the beach during the day, even in the shade, is enough.

Have you noticed any improvements on the 17 Pro Max?
I’m considering upgrading for this reason alone...

I have had my 2TB 17 PM for a week and yes the vapor chamber and aluminum unibody really have cut the heat that I saw for 2 years on my 15 PM