iPhone 15 overheating

I read all the pages of this post and personally I find some of the repeated advice to not post here as “it does not help anyone” very fishy and somewhat biased. I follow this post and am sure a lot of members do too whether current or would be owners of 15P / 15PM. I have cancelled my order for 15PM as I would never accept paying such an amount for a device which isn’t at least as efficient as the previous model and as efficient & powerful as advertised. Running hotter than it should regardless of your definition of whatever “overheating” means it is not efficient and battery life is affected. Heat loss = battery life loss. My definition of overheating is when the handset runs warm enough to become uncomfortable to hold for reasonably long periods of time when touching either face or hands and laggy during operation which does not necessarily have to lead to it shutting down due to it reaching your level of “overheating”. I wish they would resolve the issue without reducing the performance but to be honest I don’t think they will be able to so the posts here help me decide if I should still be hopeful or wait until next September. Please stop advising members to stop sharing their experiences, this is a forum and all members are here to learn from others’ experiences so they can judge accordingly. I agree with going to Apple if all technical advice was followed and still unhappy, the more handsets are returned the more active Apple shall become in resolving this issue if not for this model then at least for the Iphone 16 models.

OK, we won't tell you anything then. Let Apple know your phone is heating more than you expected it should. This is a user to user only forum. You can call Apple (if you're in the US) at: 800-MY-APPLE. You can visit the Genius Bar at your Apple Store. You can provide feedback to Apple here --> Feedback - iPhone - Apple

vitallia wrote:

That’s not great advice. Most people here are expressing that this is happening multiple times not just within the two days of getting a new phone and transferring a bunch of data. An $1,100.00 dollar device should not be randomly spiking in temperature with a month of purchase.

For the vast majority of people, whatever advice you're suggesting is not good is actually just fine. If however, a phone is randomly actually "overheating" in that the phone needs to cool down in order to continue using it (the temperature symbol is actually displayed on the screen) is happening a month later, then logic suggests they should have the phone tested at their Apple Store Genius Bar.

Update: My iPhone 15 pro max works fantastic - it took about 1 week to fix the overheating issue.

That's because I realized it's due to a lot of background activity, so I left the phone on charge overnight with WiFi on, and explicitly went through all icould images, so they'd all start downloading, and also everything else that needs to get done during initial setup.

Once it's done with all that - and this can take a long time due to the way it's only doing it when there is a demand - for example it left my photos on iCloud until I scrolled through them all, things like that - once it's done, everything is great.

I just used it to navigate on the bike, in full sunlight, GPS on, Maps on, everything worked totally fine - if anything this gets less hot than my previous iPhone.

Can we please get this answer to be accepted, since everyone has the issue, and they don't necessarily scroll down to where all the answers are that say you have to wait 2 weeks.

If it still overheats after 2 weeks, you probably actually have a bad phone. But my guess is, that's not a lot of people.

"after 1 or 2 weeks their iPhone has finally downloaded these 60,000 pictures from iCloud and it’s now smooth and cool as it should be"

It is not. I still get overheat randomly (or not, but I don't know the cause). I don't even play games on iPhone.

Apple products are premium and within its premium category the Pro, topping easily 1500$ , is generally expected to be leading and nearly flawless like all or most apple products. Had he bought a 300$ throw away android, which my staffers use as burner phones they also last months before shutdown or freezes start. So there is a correlation between price - even if the BOM is 50%, and quality.

When you purchase the forum, you can direct who can comment or not. Until then, I'm just as welcome to post as you are.

As I've said my iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max are NEVER operating too hot. They don't have any battery drain issues either. This is NOT an universal, it effects every user thing. If someone does have these issues, instead of complaining on a user to user only forum, maybe it would make more sense to have the phone checked at their closest Apple Store Genius Bar. As users only, we can't determine what might be causing heating or battery drain issues from our sofa. Have the phone checked out where Apple can determine if there is an issue.

Hello everyone,

i had the same problem (overheating and draining battery); i went to settings-> battery -> which app is using my battery the most, i found whatsapp business was the first one with background activities even having disabled this background app refrech in the app setting. So what i did? Simply, i deleted whatsapp business from

my iphone and that’s it… overheating disappeared so battery draining too. So, i advice you to see which is the big app using battery and delete it. This means app developers have a lot of work to do or apple must do something… hope i was helpful.

narelle01 wrote:

Hi - I purchased the iPhone 15 at the end of November 2023. I had no issues initially, but while on holidays over the past 2 weeks (mid Jan 2024), the phone got extremely hot, during which time the battery drained extremely rapidly. When I later plugged the phone in to charge, an onscreen message stated “Charging on hold. Charging will resume when iPhone returns to normal temperature”.

That message does not indicate that the phone is overheating. That is the normal message you will receive if you have Optimized Battery Charging enabled and the phone reaches 80% (approximately) charge. It has always been what happened with Optimized Battery Charging, but the notification (not a warning) was only added recently.

Trap4 wrote:

Mine started smoking up for 1 minute and real big puffs , then overheated and the phone was never rhe same since yesterday Lol had it 3 weeks

What did Apple Support at the Genius Bar suggest when you surely took a phone which put up "big puffs" of smoke? It it were my phone, it wouldn't be turned on again until it had been tested by Apple.

I just got the IPhone 15 Pro today and it’s so hot i can’t even hold it for very long! Hope they resolve this.

Hey, if you don’t mind me asking what is indexing? My 15 PM is heating up a lot too. I noticed as soon as a turned it on and started setting up the phone. And now I’m charging it for the first time and got super hot even tho I wasn’t even using it. I picked it up to browse on Safari and felt the heat through my case. Idk what is up but I’m really upset. I didn’t pay over $1k for this

Thank you for that explanation! Yea, Idk if mine could be because of that, a hardware issue, or a software issue. When I was setting up the phone, it got so hot that it was almost too uncomfortable to hold. I wanted to put it down, but I wanted to keep testing out my new phone so I put up with the heat. It also seemed to warm up when I was just using Spotify and browsing through safari. Then when I used FaceTime for the first time, it heated up pretty bad again for the first 20 minutes or so, then it seemed to cool down. Same thing when I first put it to charge. I had put it down to charge and when I went to go pick it back up after just a few minutes of putting it to charge, I could feel the heat through my Otterbox Symmetry case (which is made entirely out of hard plastic and is relatively thick compared to today’s cases). When I took off the case, the phone was pretty hot, again, to the point where I wanted to put it down, but could still barely bear the heat. I had heat and battery issues with my regular 12 pro, which is the whole reason why I upgraded in the first place so it’s upsetting that my brand new 15 pro max is going through this. I wonder if this is being experienced on a wider scale or if we just got unlucky and got defective phones. 😅

I have the 15 Pro Max 1tb white titanium. It is getting so hot, that I can’t even hold it. And that was just checking the weather. My 13 Pro Max never got this hot. I hope this can be fixed. This feels like a very expensive mistake.

lobsterghost1 said:

"EVERY TIME you plug your phone in to charge it WILL get warm."

Did you actually read all of the discussion here? As for mine, getting hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold while watching streaming video for 10 minutes, I hadn't had it on a charger for hours at that point.

Again, I'm not totally writing off the idea that indexing could be involved. This is far from my first rodeo with a new iPhone and I'm aware of indexing and the effects that it has. This is well beyond what I've experienced with it before though.

At the very least, I feel like it speaks very poorly to the thermals of the new phone. If it's going to heat up like this every time the processor gets a little taxed, that's potentially going to have a very significant impact on battery life and overall longevity. Apple may have finally overreached on what they can do with the current design here.