Poor signal with iPhone 12 Pro Max

I traded in my old iPhone for the 12 Max and reception at home is terrible. Need to be by a window and only works in one room of the house. Drops calls as well as my kids can not call me from another state.

I have spent hours with various techs without success. But did get an amazing tech yesterday who tried his best to increase the signal in my house. It was better yesterday, but today, not working again. Now cannot use the phone in my car. Apple is sending me a new phone next week and is providing a return for my old phone.

Really sorry for getting rid of my old phone now.

Try turning off wifi momentarily and look at the signal indicator at top right corner of the screen and see if you're really not receiving any 5G signal. If you see 5G, it is just the phone prioritizing wifi over cellular to save battery and cellular data. You can change this in settings.

I have the same carrier and same location that I reside at. My iPhone XS Max does not have the low signal and zero call drops in the same house with same SIM card. However, my newest iPhone 12 Pro Max exhibits a poor signal reception in and around the house (wifi being turned off, as you suggested earlier) and frequent call drops as well with the same SIM.

I, in fact, requested a service call-back from the apple care call center and they sent an email that their call went to my voicemail while I booked a call-back from the same phone at same location just 15 minutes ago. The call center representative acknowledged that the call was dropped that apple made while trying to reach me. There was no change in location and no change in the carrier between my call and Apple's callback.

Apple care representative booked me a visit to the Apple service center to run the hardware diagnostics. I was told the tool did not report any issues with the Antenna. However, the center representative acknowledged the call drops were seen in the phone logs.

I was sent home suggesting to reset the phone and try using again. That's an attempt which will require a data backup and restore which I am avoiding.

Anything else that you could suggest which might help in this case before I attempt the suggested reset?

Sadly no, that's all done by the base controller.

If the culprit is 5G and you have 5G on your account, you can try turning it off to see if that improves things any, otherwise there may not be anything you can do.

It's also not specifically Band 28, that's just an explanation of what the problem could be and how it's very possible for it to be an issue with the 12 Pro Max but not because anything is wrong with the 12 Pro Max.

I'm in New Orleans right now. My iPad Pro (not 5G) had 4 solid bars on LTE. My iPhone 12 pro max has 1 bar. These two devices are right next to each other. So, reading through these replies, I turned off 5G in cellular settings and restricted it to LTE, but that did nothing. still the same terrible reception on my new 12 pro max and solid reception on my iPad pro. I'm not seeing any other solutions coming from this group, even with Apple support. That tells me the 12 pro max has a bad receiver. big bummer.

Carrier is NOT the problem. Apple is. The Antenna and AGC on these phones are awful. If you put it in a "Clean" test environment, works like a champ. In the real world it's a dog. The wave of the future is to test on the consumer.

I don't work for Apple, don't own stock, but I also don't have a magic wand.

Apple designed a wonderful product that works on networks that are operating properly. Again, tens of millions worldwide have no issue, as well as the majority using AT&T. It's largely (though not exclusively) Verizon customers having problems.

Apple has zero control over what Verizon decides to do.

So what solution would you suggest I advocate?

The only options are to:

• Change your cellular carrier
• Live with it
• Sell your iPhone 12 Pro Max and purchase something else.

As you mention, if it's been less than 14 days, you can return it for a refund and purchase something else.

Otherwise used 12 Pro Max phones bring a pretty decent price on eBay and other sites that could recoup you a decent proportion of what you paid.

A consumer economy means you purchase what works for you. iPhones work best for me, and I have zero complaints; they don't for you, so perhaps another solution would work better.

My only suggestion if you take the latter route is to do your research; it's trivial to find Internet posts from Samsung Galaxy S21 users complaining of the same issues with Verizon.

Call your cellular carrier and complain; no one else can resolve this issue.

However, since you just upgraded, if you are still within your 14 day return window, you may be able to return your iPhone 12 for a full refund and purchase something else.

Express your dissatisfaction to your cellular carrier, as they are the only ones who can fix the issue.

Use 5G with your iPhone - Apple Support

It happens to me. My 12 Max when it has one bar has a hard time initiating a call and often with horrible “call failed” piping up and drops calls way too often. This is with Wi-Fi call enabled. Never happened with my iPhone 11

Other than it is a lousy phone, it’s most important aspect, the rest is great.

They can deny it all they want but there are too many of us complaining to deny it’s real.

Same issues here. I bought myself, my wife and my son all iPhone 12 Pro Max (512GB) in December. We were all upgrading from our old 7 plus models. All three of us get crap reception at our house where it used to be just fine. No way that is a coincidence. Pretty bummed to pay over $1,600 for each phone to get worse calls than my super old phone. You would think for that kind of price tag it would work better than my Dad’s prepaid Walmart phone when making calls. Carrier is Verizon with unlimited plans. Come on Apple!

I have had the same experience with my iPhone 12 Pro Max. This has been the most upsetting and most disappointing experience I have had with an Apple device to date. I regret "upgrading" from my iPhone 8 Plus. While reception was not always great with that phone in my area, I have gone from being able to make calls to dropping calls frequently and not always being able to even make calls. I'm glad I have a landline in case of an emergency! The 4G coverage in my area is terrible and it is a thoroughway between cities where many people travel. Not having 3G on my phone means the coverage is now even worse than it was before and the cell companies don't care about coverage in my area... You are definitely correct @R Cripps that your coverage has gotten worse. It has been my unfortunate experience and it seems that Apple, Samsung, Verizon, AT&T, etc... no longer care about the little guy or the consumer, they just care about their bottom dollar. I would be very happy if they came out with a phone that would actually make phone calls and not drop them constantly.

I have owned the iPhone 12 Pro Max since last November. Came from the 11 Pro Max before, and before that the XR. The latest is obviously Qualcomm, with the prior's Intel.

My signal and call performance are exactly the same on the 12 pro max as they were on the others. Exact same RSRP's, number of bars and resultant call performance. No issues at all. When testing FirstNet on ATT, the signal and call performance were exactly the same as an iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 7 on ATT (same residence location).

In fact, my data speeds are better despite no signal strength change, perhaps due to Qualcomm? That and the XR was I believe 2x2 MIMO.

I hate to hear of so many issues people seem to be having. Makes me nervous in a way (ha). But I have not had anywhere close to, the experiences you all are having. This phone has been rock solid in calls, data, texting, etc. In fact I even tested T-Mobile (forgot about that). Same thing. No issues. It performed exactly the same as an iPhone SE 2 on T-mobile. All of these side by side tests were done at my residence. And, SIM vs. e-SIM, no difference there either.

Bars are not some absolute representation of reception quality.

1) Bars only indicate relative signal strength on the device. Two bars on one phone does not mean the same as two bars on any other phone.

2) Signal strength is frequency-dependent. If, as is the case with the iPhone 12, a new phone supports reception on frequencies older phones did not, if your iPhone 12 is assigned to a different frequency than another phone would’ve been you cannot compare signal strength because they are on different frequencies.

3) This is especially the case with 5G networks, which use a completely different signal strength profile than LTE, 4G or 3G.

So when you say your iPhone 12 shows a different number of signal bars than your iPhone 11 or any other previous phone did, I would completely expect that.