Frustrating experience hitting the latest iPhone

Feb 28, 2018 09:21 GMT  ·  By

Apple’s iPhone X is one of the most expensive smartphones to date, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it can deliver flawless performance all the time.

And unfortunately for those who agreed to pay $1,000+ for the device, there are cases when the iPhone X isn’t even getting close to such flawless performance, delivering instead a compromised experience that raises questions as to how much time Apple spent testing the handset in various scenarios.

One such example is how the iPhone X performs under heavy use when the phone’s temperature normally increases. Let me detail a little bit.

When used for navigation, with apps like Waze or Google Maps, during driving, the iPhone X normally tends to get warmer or really hot, which is a behavior that perfectly makes sense since most of the phone’s sensors are being used, as well as more processing power plus the GPS itself.

But what doesn’t make sense is how the device actually handles overheating in these conditions. What I discovered is that the iPhone X most often lowers the brightness to the point where you can barely see anything on the screen, while performance is significantly throttled, most likely to allow the cooling system to do its job.

The side effect

As a result, what you get is a phone with a dimmed screen and lowered performance that can’t be restored to maximum specs unless the temperature drops.

Another problem, however, is that it takes up to 10 minutes for this cooling system to become effective and to restore full performance of the phone, so during this whole time, you have no other option than to wait.

So for instance, if you arrive at the office and remove the iPhone X from the car dock and want to take a picture, you should notice that the device needs more time to launch the camera, process the photo, and make edits, should they be needed.

The same thing appears to be happening when charging the phone with a wireless charger behind the wheel, and the overheating appears to be what’s triggering this behavior.

Possible causes

Without a doubt, this happens only when the phone gets warm or hot, so the overheating is what’s causing the excessive dimming and the performance throttling.

Most likely, Apple implemented this system as a way to prevent screen burn-ins and battery damage, but at first glance, it’s just too aggressive and provides little control to the owner.

Normally, you’d think that True Tone and automatic brightness control are to blame for this unexpected dimming of the screen, but I’ve switched both to off and the same behavior was experienced.

At this point, it doesn’t seem to be a hardware defect, but poor software optimization for the cooling system, so hopefully Apple can fix this with an iOS update. There are several threads online from users complaining of the same issues, but it’s not known how widespread this problem actually is because it needs certain factors to come into effect at the same time.

Below are Geekbench and Antutu benchmarks started when the phone was cool and hot, and by the looks of things, multi-core performance is the one that’s substantially impacted.

Apple has promised to spend more time refining the performance of iOS and improving security with the next release of the operating system, which means the company would focus less on new features. This makes sense given the criticism received by the firm following the release of iOS 11, and with bugs like this, Apple really needs to grant more time for bug hunting before rolling out new functionality and devices to users worldwide.

Photo Gallery (5 Images)

Apple iPhone X
Geekbench scores when the iPhone X was hotGeekbench scores when the iPhone X wasn't hot
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