Last night I encountered a 3 min+ ad on YT about the construction of the iPhone 17 Pro. A few seconds were devoted to the cooling system. I watched the whole thing. It was better than the video it interrupted.
Watching that video, the first thought I have is "So much engineering and I still need to buy a phone case with my new phone?"
I'm guessing phone cases are still pretty much required if you drop your phone once or twice a month onto cement/asphalt/marble/etc from pocket height.
I would be really curious to hear the internal debate at Apple wrt design tradeoffs + durability. E.g. how much of the iPhone design is only possible because Apple is assuming the average person will have a case on their phone.
I wouldn't be surprised if the typical consumer would be more impressed by "No Case Required iPhone" compared to "Skinniest and lightest iPhone yet!".
> Watching that video, the first thought I have is "So much engineering and I still need to buy a phone case with my new phone?"
You can buy a $400m yacht and still need buoys when you dock it.
Unless you want a phone that comes with a pre-installed rubber bumper around the outside, or we have some humanity altering discoveries in transparent materials science, you’re always going to have a case. Gravity and concrete are undefeated.
I think you'd be surprised by how durable the newer phones are, especially the iPhone Air. It's hard to completely protect a glass screen from shattering since its a crystalline material encased in a metal enclosure that is more likely to dent than flex, absorb the impact and return to it's shape, but they keep getting better and I think most people could go without a case if they really wanted to.
If you're curious about just how durable the iPhone Air is, take a look at the latest Jerry Rig Everything video where it exceeded his typical scratch test resits and he was unable to bend it with his hands.
I’ve been caseless for a while and have had a couple of drops and the phone has been fine. When I eventually upgrade my phone, I’ll probably stay caseless, or add minimal protection. Mainly cause if the increasingly rare catastrophic drop happens, it’d be unpleasant to deal with.
I do like some cases for their design elements, I might use one to just further personalize my phone.
The titanium iPhones, at least, are nearly impervious to scratches when dropped on concrete or asphalt from a reasonable height. I “scientifically” test this pretty often.
Because the iPhone 15 pro was significantly lighter than previous pro models, I wanted to avoid a case to get the most out of this improvement. However, I wouldn’t have even experimented with not using a case if it weren’t for the applecare+ plans that are reasonable. I’ve been surprised by the durability to the extent that I should probably discontinue the applecare+ plan.
The aluminum models might not be as durable. Compared to phones 20 or even 30 years ago that didn’t need a case, I suppose a significant difference is the density as much as the total weight or the hardness of the materials.
Phone cases are not required. I’ve been using an iPhone 12 for nearly five years now — and yes, I’ve carelessly dropped it plenty of times, onto very hard surfaces.
It’s got a couple of tiny dents in it, but the screen is untouched and it works like new. I’ve never used a case.
In the iPhone 4 era, if you were unlucky enough to drop your phone even once onto a table the screen will have almost certainly instantly shattered into a million pieces. But that’s far from true now; things have come a long way. The ‘No Case Required iPhone’ is already here.
Cases can absorb so much stress because they're made of soft materials that degrade over time. I replace mine ~once a year. Such materials aren't really a good match to be built directly into a phone.
How do you propose making a device that people wouldn't feel the need to put a case on? You could make the whole thing out of rubber but that's still going to take cosmetic damage that people want to protect the device from. You could make it easy to replace that rubber... but at what point is that not just functionally the same as a case?
I started using cases after having a Pixel 2 XL shatter in a 1 foot drop onto a granite countertop, but started going case-less again with my most recent iPhone 15 Pro (ironically, after the horrible quality Apple case I mistakenly bought with it disintegrated).
It's been a year so far of completely non-cautious use and my general take is:
* The screen still scratches; I leave my phone in my pocket or a bicycle saddle bag and it definitely has some damage. However, it is only visible with the screen off, and it turns out not to bother me a single bit.
* The frame of the phone seems almost invulnerable; even with a case many of my older phones got dinged corners, and this one is perfect.
* Overall, the only functional issue I have had with going caseless has been the propensity for the protruding cameras to pick up dust and fingerprints. I find myself having to wipe them even more frequently than I did when I had a case.
I suspect that a case still would have been a net-positive fiscal investment, I'll probably have to sell this phone in "good" or "fair" condition rather than "factory new" like a phone with a case and glass screen protector for its whole life, so I'll lose $50-$100. But I like using the phone on its own. The side and action buttons finally function as they should and the size benefit is appreciated.
Anyway, I'm now a caseless fan and this makes me very interested in the new Air. I think the need for cases is perhaps overblown and especially in a premium market like high-end iPhones where the consumer probably isn't as sensitive to aftermarket value, no-case isn't as rare or foolish as it would seem. For that reason, I doubt a bit that Apple are assuming the average person has a case on their phone. I'm sure they do focus groups, testing, and have some degree of telemetry to understand the case-vs-no-case debate in detail and I strongly doubt that the conclusion is "we assume there will be a case so we will do X".
> I'm guessing phone cases are still pretty much required if you drop your phone once or twice a month onto cement/asphalt/marble/etc from pocket height.
This hasn’t been true for a while with iPhones. I drop mine about this often, and after a few years it’s a little scratched but otherwise fine.
> I'm guessing phone cases are still pretty much required if you drop your phone once or twice a month onto cement/asphalt/marble/etc from pocket height.
Here's video of a drop test where the new Pro version survived drops to the pavement on its front, back, and side from hip height, then the same three drops from shoulder height, before finally having the front glass fail in the third drop from as high above his head as dude's arms would reach.
If you want to do a trade in every 1, 2, or 3 years then scratches or damage to the phone can decrease the value on the old phone.
I tried rocking no case and broke the screen which isn’t a huge deal but required attention, downtime, and the phone didn’t work the same way after repair.
I think the average person wouldn't run into a meaningful problem without a case, maybe a light scratch or two somewhere if they looked closely, it's just the idea they might need a case that leads them to use one. This is probably even more true of screen protectors - which add on to this because they scratch much easier than a phone screen would, making people think "wow, it's a good thing I used a screen protector!" even if it wouldn't have been a problem for them.
Because of the above, I don't think there is anything (reasonable) smartphone manufacturers could do to make people feel like they shouldn't add one just in "case".
I'm a person who tends to accidentally throw my phone around a lot, and don't use a case (cause the added bulk makes me throw it around even more). Often on ceramic tiles, often with added velocity from me walking or hitting it in the air while trying to catch it.
My iPhone 13 Pro still survived 3 years, and only had some scratches and bruises on its corners, but nothing broke (still in use, by someone else now). My iPhone 16 Pro after a year of that same treatment is almost unblemished (a small bruise on one of the corners).
These are, in practice, extremely resistant to damage.
After iPhone 14, they are remarkably durable in any fall situation.
My 14 pro flew from its mount while driving 80km on a motorbike in Vietnam and bounced about on the asphalt, when I eventually retrieved it, it had a few small scratches, and a crack at the back, which I “fixed” by just adding a case.
Honestly I was incredibly surprised, previous phones I owned would shatter to bits if the fell from the bedside table, this guy literally survived a highway toss. Props to the engineers.
I remember that there was a Dilbert comic, back when Apple started releasing models with back-and-front glass, that referred to "a smartphone" as being "BSB," which stood for "Beautiful, Slippery, Brittle." The idea was that buyers were encouraged to not get a case (thus, hiding the "beauty"), but it was easy to drop ("slippery"), and easy to break ("brittle").
I don't use a phone case or a screen protector. Examining my phone which is about two years old, there are a few hairline cracks on the back glass, and the front glass is mildly scratched if I hold it at just the right angle to catch the light. I'm sure if I dropped it on concrete at the right height and angle it'd fully crack the screen but generally speaking I haven't needed a case in nearly a decade.
I’ve been carrying an iPhone since the first one - so, almost 20 years?
Have never used a case. I’ve dropped them plenty of times. Only once did I do major damage, and that was to the all-glass rear panel of a 4S. I’ve never broken a screen or had to replace a phone due to damage.
The iPhone is very durable! You don’t need a case. They’re bulky and ugly!
I don't have experience with iPhones, but I assume they're pretty similar to recent non-foldable Samsung flagships. My S23U has had many falls over the past 2.5 years, been surprisingly fine. Maybe they've finally gotten good enough to survive the typical fall reliably.
> I still need to buy a phone case with my new phone?
…you don’t. I don’t. My phone is scratched here and there, but not in a way that I notice. I used to defend this with my purchasing of insurance, but frankly, I crack the screen now maybe once every 2+ years.
> Apple is assuming the average person will have a case on their phone
I think it is fair to assume that irrespective of the design, most people will case their phones. Leaning into that is fine as long as the phone is still functional without a case. (Which, again, every iPhone in the last decade has been.)
I have an iPhone 13 pro max. Bought it on release, never used a case and it’s still in perfect condition. I don’t drop it once or twice a month though, but definitely dropped it before.
I've never used a case, throw my phones in every corner and never cracked the screen. Anecdotally, I see fewer and fewer broken phones with every year, they last.
With the new thin phones, and unibody metal phones, I hope people start moving towards ultra-thin aramid/kevlar cases. I have one on an S25 Edge and it's a lot different from the fatter phone era. I don't see why you wouldn't, frankly, on the new shatterless iPhones.
AppleCare+ basically makes it so having a case or screen protector isn't a requirement for me. I was actually only using a screen protector for about a year, but what I found was they actually are more fragile than the phone's screen itself. I was going through them every 2-3 months. So about a year ago I stopped using screen protectors as well and have dropped the phone many times like how I dropped it with the screen protector and the screen has been fine.
Sure I have some scratches on the screen, but so what? If the front or back glass shatter, it's $29 to fix.
> I'm guessing phone cases are still pretty much required if you drop your phone once or twice a month onto cement/asphalt/marble/etc from pocket height.
I mean... yeah? What consumer tech is that resilient? Maybe put a lanyard on the your phone and attach it to your belt, I mean..
They could make a toughbook style phone for people with such habits, but engineering a mainstream device for such resiliency is going to be overkill for most users and cause a lot of tradeoffs in size/cost/features.
This is a heat pipe. A technology from the 60s. Your laptop almost certainly has heat pipes in it. They usually use alcohol rather than water as the phase change material though. The (relatively) novel thing is that it's packaged small enough to be in a phone. I suspect the only reason it hasn't been used in handhelds more is because the TDP of mobile processors wasn't high enough to warrant it.
Vapor chambers and heat pipes use some of the same physics concepts, but a vapor chamber is significantly more effective for spreading heat across a large area. They’re also harder to manufacture and more complex.
Have you ever seen a CPU or GPU heat sink that has 5-6 heat pipes in parallel because they need to spread the head over a larger area? A vapor chamber is an upgrade over heat pipes in applications that aren’t moving heat from a point to a line.
Perhaps it's just that in retrospect, it seems a relatively small jump from heat pumps to vapor chambers.
Do you know if the vapor chambers operate at reduced internal atmospheric pressure? Unless I'm missing something, in order to get the liquid-gas phase boundary to a useful temperature, you'd have to bring the pressure down to, idk, 10kPa (boiling point of water is ~50C)? That would complicate manufacturing for sure, and also means that any leaks are catastrophic for your thermal solution.
Also I would be remiss if I did not note that the refrigerant designation of water is R-718.
Heat pipes are one dimensional (a pipe), vapor chambers are two dimensional (a square chamber). Most vapor chambers I've seen on GPUs have the chamber attached to lots of small heat pipes on the side though (they even note this in article, in case you feel like reading it).
That said, I assume the main technical breakthrough here is in manufacturing, producing tiny chambers consistently in enough volume for iphones.
Any passive phase change thermal solution is doing the same thing - take thermal energy from one place, and distribute it for dissipation. My point is that the geometric configuration isn't that important, it's doing the same work the same way. Not really worth arguing about, I just suspect that the branding people love that they had a new buzzword in "vapor chamber" to bandy about.
As I understand it, it’s more than that: there are small “inverted pyramids” that cause the water to condense more rapidly, to extract even more heat from the system.
>The (relatively) novel thing is that it's packaged small enough to be in a phone
Android/other phones have had heat pipes/vapour chambers for a long time now. I'm not sure why anybody calls this novel or new even when applied to mobile devices.
Vapor chambers are in laptops already. Mostly gaming laptops, because they need help getting the heat away from GPUs.
The miniaturisation of vapor chambers is cool, though. Not new (phones have been coming out with those for years), but it's not "just" another heatpipe.
I think that the fact that more and more phones producing so much heat that they need vapor chambers is also something worth writing about.
That said, most news media seems to have drunk the Apple kool aid because they all rave about the vapor chamber for some reason. I guess iPhone media is just a few years behind the curve.
Oppo uses these in some of their phones. They gave a factory tour to the "Know Art" Youtube channel, which made a good video on it: https://youtu.be/qAZ-q3KmDHM
I'm interested to see how many/few complaints we see about the iPhone Air overheating, since it has almost the exact same chip as the 17 Pro but a simpler cooling system
"My phone is really hot, is this normal or is it broken?!" is something I started getting asked by random iPhone-using friends over the last few years as they upgraded to a new model and then felt it sizzling.
Got my air yesterday and it definitely gets hot. Will see how it does after a few days as I expected the heat due to the initial sync and transfer, and iOS indexes everything for a day or two.
Got my air yesterday and it definitely gets hot. Will see how it does after a few days as I expected the heat due to the initial sync and transfer, and iOS indexes everything for a day or two.
I have one, too, and you're right that the heating is just what happens while it restores its data and settings and whatnot.
I believe it also re-scans your entire photo library to re-identify dogs, cars, people, etc. with whatever improved algorithm comes with the new chip/OS.
This happens every time you get a new iPhone. Depending on how much it has to sort through, it can take a couple of hours to a week.
I always leave the case off for the first few days.
>I'm interested to see how many/few complaints we see about the iPhone Air overheating
One less core, and from the benchmarking it's clear that it throttles a fair bit earlier than the rest. Even worse its a titanium body so worse dissipation
Why have none of the major players tried integrating a case? Making a ruggedized version? They could probably do a lot better and find ways to innovate with something integrated.
Why do they ignore the fact that so many people use cases (and the market opportunity)? It's almost a defect at this point. Some people like the personalization but I think a lot of people just want something that won't break when you drop it...
> Why do they ignore the fact that so many people use cases (and the market opportunity)?
Apple sells cases.
There are ruggedized phones available. The market is small.
You can get away without a case with a modern iPhone for longer than most people assume.
The average person does better with a $10 sacrificial case layer that snaps on to their phone that can be replaced whenever they want or if it gets damaged.
Lots of reasons. The most obvious ones that come to mind:
1. People like a variety of custom cases that themselves have features (eg wallet cases random designs etc). If it’s built into the phone that customization capability is worse because you now have two layers of protection making for a very thick and heat-insulating design.
2. It’s valuable to have partners that make accessories for your device. If you kill that line of business for them, other things may go away and those partners will want to work with you less.
3. An integrated case will still suffer cosmetic damage. But now without the option to replace, you’re stuck with that damage.
I’ve had phones before that rugged enough to not want a case. It’s great, I wish there were good options like that today. But I think I prefer a separate case. When mine gets enough wear and tear, I replace it and it feels like I have a whole new phone.
When the bare phone is in your hand and it's quite a bit warmer than body temperature, your hand may very well be carrying away more heat than ambient air exchange would be capable of.
For phones that heat up enough to need it, the screen also acts as a way to dissipate heat. Unless you put an extremely thick screen protector on there, the phone will still be able to get rid of some heat through the glass.
I do wonder how this will affect benchmarks, though. I can imagine the phones running slower in practice compared to reviews because the reviewers don't put a case on there.
I've noticed my iPhone get hot the most while using the camera. Especially while taking video, but after a few photos it gets hot as well. I was on vacations last week in a tropical country and took a lot of photos with my 16 Pro and it gets so hot after just a few photos that it starts lagging A LOT due to the throttling.
I'm sure this is handy for LLM usage, but this was a problem before those were a thing I'd say.
I have the same case, iPhone 16 pro is getting really hot when taking photos and videos it’s unbearable. I will change my phone for that reason, the battery melts right away …
I noticed something though, when taking a picture with the x5 camera if I cover the main lens the brightness changes. So I think the iPhone now merges the two stream to enhance quality. That wasn’t the case before and that might be why the phone is getting hot
Readit News
https://youtu.be/_-AS5DtDeqs?si=rTfubRDArVupqREt
I'm guessing phone cases are still pretty much required if you drop your phone once or twice a month onto cement/asphalt/marble/etc from pocket height.
I would be really curious to hear the internal debate at Apple wrt design tradeoffs + durability. E.g. how much of the iPhone design is only possible because Apple is assuming the average person will have a case on their phone.
I wouldn't be surprised if the typical consumer would be more impressed by "No Case Required iPhone" compared to "Skinniest and lightest iPhone yet!".
Having a sacrificial outer layer that I can replace for $10 is also preferable to letting the $1000 phone take the damage.
You can buy a $400m yacht and still need buoys when you dock it.
Unless you want a phone that comes with a pre-installed rubber bumper around the outside, or we have some humanity altering discoveries in transparent materials science, you’re always going to have a case. Gravity and concrete are undefeated.
If you're curious about just how durable the iPhone Air is, take a look at the latest Jerry Rig Everything video where it exceeded his typical scratch test resits and he was unable to bend it with his hands.
https://youtu.be/sQ56ve39l2I?si=XOgAtnlAtOwO4Lln
I do like some cases for their design elements, I might use one to just further personalize my phone.
Because the iPhone 15 pro was significantly lighter than previous pro models, I wanted to avoid a case to get the most out of this improvement. However, I wouldn’t have even experimented with not using a case if it weren’t for the applecare+ plans that are reasonable. I’ve been surprised by the durability to the extent that I should probably discontinue the applecare+ plan.
The aluminum models might not be as durable. Compared to phones 20 or even 30 years ago that didn’t need a case, I suppose a significant difference is the density as much as the total weight or the hardness of the materials.
It’s got a couple of tiny dents in it, but the screen is untouched and it works like new. I’ve never used a case.
In the iPhone 4 era, if you were unlucky enough to drop your phone even once onto a table the screen will have almost certainly instantly shattered into a million pieces. But that’s far from true now; things have come a long way. The ‘No Case Required iPhone’ is already here.
It's been a year so far of completely non-cautious use and my general take is:
* The screen still scratches; I leave my phone in my pocket or a bicycle saddle bag and it definitely has some damage. However, it is only visible with the screen off, and it turns out not to bother me a single bit.
* The frame of the phone seems almost invulnerable; even with a case many of my older phones got dinged corners, and this one is perfect.
* Overall, the only functional issue I have had with going caseless has been the propensity for the protruding cameras to pick up dust and fingerprints. I find myself having to wipe them even more frequently than I did when I had a case.
I suspect that a case still would have been a net-positive fiscal investment, I'll probably have to sell this phone in "good" or "fair" condition rather than "factory new" like a phone with a case and glass screen protector for its whole life, so I'll lose $50-$100. But I like using the phone on its own. The side and action buttons finally function as they should and the size benefit is appreciated.
Anyway, I'm now a caseless fan and this makes me very interested in the new Air. I think the need for cases is perhaps overblown and especially in a premium market like high-end iPhones where the consumer probably isn't as sensitive to aftermarket value, no-case isn't as rare or foolish as it would seem. For that reason, I doubt a bit that Apple are assuming the average person has a case on their phone. I'm sure they do focus groups, testing, and have some degree of telemetry to understand the case-vs-no-case debate in detail and I strongly doubt that the conclusion is "we assume there will be a case so we will do X".
This hasn’t been true for a while with iPhones. I drop mine about this often, and after a few years it’s a little scratched but otherwise fine.
Here's video of a drop test where the new Pro version survived drops to the pavement on its front, back, and side from hip height, then the same three drops from shoulder height, before finally having the front glass fail in the third drop from as high above his head as dude's arms would reach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oof5z3BNTdY
Not exactly super fragile, although the orange finish on the aluminum scuffed up much more easily than the finish they use on titanium frames.
I tried rocking no case and broke the screen which isn’t a huge deal but required attention, downtime, and the phone didn’t work the same way after repair.
Because of the above, I don't think there is anything (reasonable) smartphone manufacturers could do to make people feel like they shouldn't add one just in "case".
I'm a person who tends to accidentally throw my phone around a lot, and don't use a case (cause the added bulk makes me throw it around even more). Often on ceramic tiles, often with added velocity from me walking or hitting it in the air while trying to catch it.
My iPhone 13 Pro still survived 3 years, and only had some scratches and bruises on its corners, but nothing broke (still in use, by someone else now). My iPhone 16 Pro after a year of that same treatment is almost unblemished (a small bruise on one of the corners).
These are, in practice, extremely resistant to damage.
My 14 pro flew from its mount while driving 80km on a motorbike in Vietnam and bounced about on the asphalt, when I eventually retrieved it, it had a few small scratches, and a crack at the back, which I “fixed” by just adding a case.
Honestly I was incredibly surprised, previous phones I owned would shatter to bits if the fell from the bedside table, this guy literally survived a highway toss. Props to the engineers.
Deleted Comment
Have never used a case. I’ve dropped them plenty of times. Only once did I do major damage, and that was to the all-glass rear panel of a 4S. I’ve never broken a screen or had to replace a phone due to damage.
The iPhone is very durable! You don’t need a case. They’re bulky and ugly!
…you don’t. I don’t. My phone is scratched here and there, but not in a way that I notice. I used to defend this with my purchasing of insurance, but frankly, I crack the screen now maybe once every 2+ years.
> Apple is assuming the average person will have a case on their phone
I think it is fair to assume that irrespective of the design, most people will case their phones. Leaning into that is fine as long as the phone is still functional without a case. (Which, again, every iPhone in the last decade has been.)
Sure I have some scratches on the screen, but so what? If the front or back glass shatter, it's $29 to fix.
I mean... yeah? What consumer tech is that resilient? Maybe put a lanyard on the your phone and attach it to your belt, I mean..
They could make a toughbook style phone for people with such habits, but engineering a mainstream device for such resiliency is going to be overkill for most users and cause a lot of tradeoffs in size/cost/features.
Have you ever seen a CPU or GPU heat sink that has 5-6 heat pipes in parallel because they need to spread the head over a larger area? A vapor chamber is an upgrade over heat pipes in applications that aren’t moving heat from a point to a line.
Don’t be so dismissive. This is actually cool.
Do you know if the vapor chambers operate at reduced internal atmospheric pressure? Unless I'm missing something, in order to get the liquid-gas phase boundary to a useful temperature, you'd have to bring the pressure down to, idk, 10kPa (boiling point of water is ~50C)? That would complicate manufacturing for sure, and also means that any leaks are catastrophic for your thermal solution.
Also I would be remiss if I did not note that the refrigerant designation of water is R-718.
That said, I assume the main technical breakthrough here is in manufacturing, producing tiny chambers consistently in enough volume for iphones.
I liked this article from 10 years ago that actually goes into detail about how Fujitsu actually constructed a super-thin heat pipe (really just a very long vapor chamber) https://spectrum.ieee.org/superslim-liquid-loop-will-keep-fu...
https://youtu.be/qAZ-q3KmDHM?si=pb08RMHEAA4o94xF
I agree with the other commenters that "vapor chamber" is a kind of heat pipe, since "heat pipe" doesn't really impose constant radii by definition.
Android/other phones have had heat pipes/vapour chambers for a long time now. I'm not sure why anybody calls this novel or new even when applied to mobile devices.
Moar Apple effect, I guess.
The miniaturisation of vapor chambers is cool, though. Not new (phones have been coming out with those for years), but it's not "just" another heatpipe.
I think that the fact that more and more phones producing so much heat that they need vapor chambers is also something worth writing about.
That said, most news media seems to have drunk the Apple kool aid because they all rave about the vapor chamber for some reason. I guess iPhone media is just a few years behind the curve.
Wonder what the next Apple "innovation" will be.
"My phone is really hot, is this normal or is it broken?!" is something I started getting asked by random iPhone-using friends over the last few years as they upgraded to a new model and then felt it sizzling.
But even then it was no hotter than my 16 Pro
I have one, too, and you're right that the heating is just what happens while it restores its data and settings and whatnot.
I believe it also re-scans your entire photo library to re-identify dogs, cars, people, etc. with whatever improved algorithm comes with the new chip/OS.
This happens every time you get a new iPhone. Depending on how much it has to sort through, it can take a couple of hours to a week.
I always leave the case off for the first few days.
One less core, and from the benchmarking it's clear that it throttles a fair bit earlier than the rest. Even worse its a titanium body so worse dissipation
At least the heat will be spread out from one spot (and into the battery?). All phone makers are doing what they can within the design constraints.
Why do they ignore the fact that so many people use cases (and the market opportunity)? It's almost a defect at this point. Some people like the personalization but I think a lot of people just want something that won't break when you drop it...
Apple sells cases.
There are ruggedized phones available. The market is small.
You can get away without a case with a modern iPhone for longer than most people assume.
The average person does better with a $10 sacrificial case layer that snaps on to their phone that can be replaced whenever they want or if it gets damaged.
1. People like a variety of custom cases that themselves have features (eg wallet cases random designs etc). If it’s built into the phone that customization capability is worse because you now have two layers of protection making for a very thick and heat-insulating design.
2. It’s valuable to have partners that make accessories for your device. If you kill that line of business for them, other things may go away and those partners will want to work with you less.
3. An integrated case will still suffer cosmetic damage. But now without the option to replace, you’re stuck with that damage.
Or their hand. Or their pocket.
It’s fine. It’s planned.
The cooling solution’s job is to spread the heat around as much as possible so it can be dissipated in the limited conditions available.
I do wonder how this will affect benchmarks, though. I can imagine the phones running slower in practice compared to reviews because the reviewers don't put a case on there.
I'm sure this is handy for LLM usage, but this was a problem before those were a thing I'd say.