Poor signal with iPhone 12 Pro Max

It’s not your carrier. I’ve been experiencing the same issue on Verizon’s network. Never had any issues on my X. Now, in areas that I used to get 4 bars, I have no service. I’ve tried every single “fix” out there, and nothing works. It appears that Apples attempt at 5G has left us with nothing but useless wi-fi bricks. The wife’s work phone, an X, on Verizon’s network performs flawlessly at delivering strong signals.

Thanks for everyone's persistence on this thread. When I first explored possible reasons for no signal reception on my iPhone 12 compared to previous models, I thought it was the phone's new 5G antenna. After reading and trying the various "fixes" suggested on both my carrier's (Verizon) and Apple's community forums, I'm not so sure anymore. It appears there may be more than one culprit. Short of Verizon and Apple spending a little more time on this issue, I'm thinking Dogcow-Moof is probably right…either get another device or change cellphone carrier, which are rather unattractive alternatives considering the cost. Trying to address this issue has been quite frustrating.

I've had crappy reception at home from Verizon ever since I moved here 4 years and three phones ago. One bar. Generally good reception in much of Madison, WI area, but out on the far west side where much new construction is going on the reception is terrible even though the nearest tower is only a mile or so away.

The thing is, it's not so much about distance to a tower, it's the frequencies used by the tower and whether the antennas are properly optimized for those frequencies and if there are any other issues.

After contacting APPLE support, for the 2nd time, about the issues with this phone’s dropped calls and bad signal, they finally sent a new (not refurb) replacement. Signal went up- Call quality went up - dropped calls were slim to none! And I didn’t have to change carriers! Gee, looks like I was right all along. Perhaps there was a bad batch of phones out there with crap antennas!

how do yu know?

Do yu have any technical solutions to improve reception or how to avoid disconnections every 10 mins ?

if we report issues w our devices hopefully apple would look into this and maybe issue some update to fix this;

It's not Apple's issue, it's your cellular provider.

Millions of users around the world have the same phones with no issues whatsoever.

Admittedly, many of them are on AT&T, but some AT&T users have seen issues as well.

On numerous occasions users who did have these issues had them suddenly disappear when their carrier made changes to a local tower.

Apple won't issue an update to fix this because their devices aren't broken.

I have the same issue, but demonstrably so. Specifically, I have two iPhones. One is an 8. The other is a 12pro. The 8 is on 4G. The 12 on 5G. Doesn’t matter where I am, my 8 ALWAYS has more bars and better reception. That said, it might be a carrier issue. The 8 is T-Mobile. The 12 is AT&T.

You cannot compare bars from phone to phone; the bars only show relative signal level as a proportion of what the phone can receive and a given signal level will not read the same between an iPhone 8 and iPhone 12.

In fact, I CAN compare them. Read my post. I just did. And had you read more closely, you would have seen I said it’s more than just bars. It’s the connection. The 8 has a stronger more reliable connection even though it’s on 4G. And to be clear, I mean it doesn’t drop as often, the streaming spreads are better, the browser doesn’t freeze as often, etc. (In other words, it’s a lot more than counting bars.)

Yes, same issue. It is obviously a 5G issu. My home is on the edge of good 5G reception. I don’t understand why my 12 doesn’t have the option of switching to 4G when 5G is not giving enough reception. The option is LTE, which I had to switch off when I had a 8S phone in order to get better reception. I want 4 G please.

You didn't read my previous response stating LTE/4G isn't directly comparable in that manner because the iPhone 12 supports more LTE frequencies that the tower may not be properly optimized for, and the phone has no control over which frequency it uses, it's assigned them by the tower's BSC (base station controller.)

If the BSC assigns your phone to a frequency the antenna/tower/BTS isn't handling properly, you're out of luck until your cellular provider fixes it.

In this way you can easily have an iPhone 8 with full bars next to a properly functioning iPhone 12 with none at all through no fault of the iPhone 12 whatsoever.

Bruh. You’re totally missing the point. It doesn’t matter “why.” All that matters is that it is. Downtown Houston. 24/7. My 4G iPhone 8–deplete of storage and memory—outperforms my 5G iPhone 12 max pro always.

shouldn’t be that way

I’m advocating nothing. Nor am I mad about anything. Those are your words. Though, if Adobe kept crashing on my iPhone 12, but working even better than normal on my iPhone 8, you’re right . . . I’d probably reply exactly the same way.

Which is to say: Bruh. You’re missing the point.

No I'm not.

If it were crashing on the iPhone 12 but not on the 8 it would still more likely be Adobe's issue to resolve, not Apple's.

So you can feel free to believe an issue millions of users do not experience worldwide is Apple's to fix, but they're not going to break their own device to play well with a provider's misconfigured network, so it's an impasse.