iPhone 15 Pro Max Geekbench benchmarks after the iOS 17.0.3 patch applied
While the patch that addressed overheating issues on the iPhone 15 has only been out about an hour and a half, initial testing shows that there does not appear to be any impact to performance.
Early iPhone 15 hands on experiences were strange to read, with a clear dichotomy. In those accounts, some phones were getting very hot, and some weren’t. Reliable data on this was obscured somewhat by phones indexing after data transfer or OS update, which just complicated assessment.
As the days wore on, it was clear that not every user was complaining about heat, nor was it a majority of iPhone 15 users. There were some, and we had a brief bout of it with one of our staffers early — but that case cleared up.
But social media hammered on with the idea, picked up and amplified by the tribal nature of the internet.
Apple waited until September 30 to say something about it. At the time, they blamed the heating on Instagram and other apps, in conjunction with a bug in iOS 17.0.2 that was aggravating the issue.
In the hour and a half that the update has been available, we’ve updated a few of our iPhones with the patch, and re-ran benchmarking that we relied upon in some of our reviews.
We ran every benchmark we did in the reviews, several times, across multiple runs and users. In every case, we got what we saw in the reviews, with little or no variance.
If you hammer any computing device, or charge a battery, it will get hot. Physics and chemistry are inescapable. We do believe that the iPhone could have better cooling systems for longer-term performance, but that’s neither here nor there today.
Ultimately, time will tell on this, and I’m sure that there will be outlier experiences and applications, as benchmarking isn’t the universal be-all end-all of performance testing. But today, initial testing with a wide net doesn’t seem to show any significant performance issues induced by the patch.
