iPhone 6s home button over 130 F

[pjpolito]

Today I used my phone for directions. Shortly after arriving I went back to my phone but I couldn't wake it. I didn't think it could be dead already but I plugged it in. Within a few minutes I tried to wake it and the home button was hot. Really hot. At work I stuck a thermistor to it and registered >130F. It stayed that way for over three hours until I got to the Apple Store where they took it and sent it off for repair.

I've never heard of this issue. Any thoughts?

Sorry if I'm reposting a similar thread; I looked but never came across one. . .

 

[Mlrollin91]

That's very odd. The phone will auto-shutdown if it gets above 120F.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

This particular problem, on an iPhone? No. I've seen something similar in a 50KW AM broadcast transmitter... in one of those babies, a few ohms of stray resistance in a closed switch contact (say, some tarnished/oxidized silver) can vaporize a half-inch thick bar of copper before the circuit breaker can trip.

The Home button is a mechanical switch. If it fails in such a way that it exhibits a permanently closed circuit with some electrical resistance, then electron flow is going to heat that sucker. While the spot temperature on the button might exceed the 120 degree shutdown temperature, the temperature at the closest temperature sensor may not have yet reached 120 degrees. Now, switches of that sort are designed to fail as permanently open, rather than permanently closed, but when a company uses more than 200 million such switches in a year, the odds are in favor of encountering some odds-beating failures.