Apple Intelligence will be “foundational” for the iPhone and other products, the company’s CEO Tim Cook told me recently in an expansive interview. A new report suggests that this fall’s iPhones, the iPhone 17 series, will be redesigned to accommodate it better with improved thermal management.
Apple iPhone 16 Pro – will the iPhone 17 change the thermal management?
New hardware for heat dissipation is being introduced to the entire iPhone 17 range, according to a Fast Technology report from Chinese tech site, mydrivers.com. “Apple will add heat sinks to the iPhone 17 series and all models will be equipped with VC [Vapor Chamber] uniform heat plate dissipation,” the site says, in machine translation.
Vapor chamber cooling is already in place in plenty of Android phones, but Apple has yet to use it. Reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed last year that this kind of thermal management would be coming to the iPhone this fall, though that report said it was for iPhone 17 Pro Max only, while this clearly indicates it’s planned for all four iPhone 17 models.
The technology is especially good at spreading heat across a large surface area, reducing the need for throttling performance to keep the temperature under control.
Managing the temperature for an iPhone is important on numerous levels. For a start, in 2023 Apple had a problem when the iPhone 15 was released and some phones overheated. Apple told me exclusively at the time that a bug was to blame, and patched the software accordingly.
The iPhone 16 series changed the structure of the phone to improve things, but perhaps there is further to go, Apple may think. The new vapor chamber would likely work in tandem with the current system.
The other reason you need the temperature of the iPhone under control is Apple Intelligence. Apple is regularly putting pressure on the iPhone’s processor with the demands Apple Intelligence makes, especially since the company wants so much of it to be done on-device. This is only likely to increase with this fall’s iPhones, as more is done on the phone and as the capabilities of Apple Intelligence improve.
The introduction of the vapor chamber, the report says, will help close the gap between Android and iPhone. “At present, the Android flagship has far surpassed the iPhone in terms of screen, performance, heat dissipation, battery, image, etc.”
