There’s a paradox at the heart of phone design. Buyers want faster phones in smaller frames, but the speedier the phone, the hotter the chipset gets.
You want to keep that heat away from the owner for obvious reasons, which is tricky with a thin frame.
Clever engineering has largely made this problem invisible to buyers, even in the best phones with their powerful chipsets. Now it looks like Apple plans to introduce a solution seen in high-end Android devices to keep its upcoming iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max handsets cool under pressure.
Vapor chamber cooling is coming
A new Weibo post from the leaker Instant Digital says that both iPhone 17 Pro models will use vapor chamber cooling to cope with the power of the A19 Pro chip, rather than the standard heatsinks used in current models.
“With A19 Pro's stronger thermal management, high load and high performance basically do not reduce frequency,” a machine translation of his post concludes.
In other words, while current models artificially limit their speed when things get too hot (something known as “throttling”), the upcoming phones’ vapor cooling should eliminate the need for that, theoretically giving you better performance.
If you’re unfamiliar, my colleague Josh Render, who used to be a phone engineer, explains how vapor chambers work here.
The diagram above showing Xiaomi's solution gives you an idea.
In short, a sealed chamber sits on top of the chip which contains a liquid. When the processor gets hot, the liquid turns into vapor, where it evaporates to another part of the chamber, shifting the heat away from the chip. As it cools, it condenses and returns to its original position, ready to start the process all over again.
What about the iPhone 17 Air?
It isn’t the first time we’ve heard reports of Apple adopting vapor chamber cooling. Back in 2021, the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that Apple would be “aggressively testing” the technology, and more recently another Chinese source claimed the upgrade was in the works, but for all iPhone 17 models.
Kuo, meanwhile, popped up again last year to predict the cooling feature would only appear in the iPhone 17 Pro Max.
The fact that the iPhone 17 Air is excluded from both Kuo’s previous post and today’s prediction is a little worrisome. The upcoming ultra-thin handset’s rumored 5.5mm footprint means that you’re more likely to feel a device overheating than ever before, though it’s possible it will use a less powerful chipset to compensate.
Or perhaps Apple will throttle the chip on the iPhone 17 Air to prevent overheating.
The iPhone 17 lineup isn't expected to launch until September. So be sure to check out our iPhone 17 hub and iPhone 17 Pro Max hub for all the latest rumors and leaks.
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