The iPhone 17 Pro may not burn your hands when you run multiple apps at once, as it will get liquid cooling chambers.
The latest iPhone 17 design update rumor comes from Chinese leaker Instant Digital, who wrote on Weibo that the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max will have vapor cooling chambers to better manage heat dissipation. This comes after two previous reports saying the cooling hardware would be introduced in the iPhone 17 Pro Max exclusively and that it would be included in all iPhone 17 models.
“It is confirmed that 17 Pro/17 Pro Max will use steam cavity [i.e. vapor chamber] to dissipate heat,” Instant Digital said. “Pro has no knife method, and with A19 Pro’s stronger thermal management, high load and high performance basically do not reduce the frequency.”
The possibility of Apple building the liquid cooling chambers inside the Pro models of the iPhone 17 sounds plausible when you take overheating issues of the previous iPhones into consideration, let alone the Pro models. In our review of the iPhone 16 Pro, we mentioned that the phone would get hot from alternating between apps, especially work-related apps. The A18 Pro chip embedded into the phone is a double-edged sword: it brings optimal performance to the phone but it still makes it overheat no matter how many apps you’re using at one time. The aluminum chassis having a graphite-clad aluminum substructure helps dissipate heat from inside phone more efficiently, but even then, it’ll still overheat because the glass on the display doesn’t conduct the heat too well.
The iPhone 15 Pro‘s overheating issue, on the other hand, had less to do with its design and more with software, as Apple said third-party apps caused the phones to overheat when running. The company has since released software updates for both phones to address the issue.
If the iPhone 17 Pro models do come with liquid cooling chambers, they won’t have any overheating issues during the first week or so of usage. But then, we must wait and see what Apple has to say on the matter.
