Is your iPhone 15 Pro overheating? If so, pay attention to Portrait Mode, there may be a software bug that’s causing this issue… And let me know in the comments if it’s happening to you too.

At the end of the year, I was intensively testing my new iPhone 15 Pro. And I was quite surprised to find that it was extremely overheating in some situations – and for no apparent reason. It got very hot when I was quite routinely playing around with portrait mode.

It was really extremely overheating to the point that the system showed me a never-before-seen “iPhone needs to cool down” error message – see the printscreen.

What causes Phone 15 Pro’s overheating? A fix was supposed to come, but…

Overheating of the iPhone 15 Pro was a pretty big topic in the first few weeks after launch, but as Apple announced, it was a software bug that an update was supposed to fix. From countless different reactions, it seemed that the lightweight titanium construction and extremely powerful processor led to the cooling issues.

Most of the debates ended just after the updates a few weeks ago, so I took everything as a closed case. My version of iOS was just the very latest and up-to-date one (17.2.1). So everything should be fine. But it wasn’t.

I was quite scared – I contacted Apple support, but they didn’t find anything, they tested the system remotely and didn’t find any hardware errors. Their verdict can be summarized in a nutshell: 1. the integrity of the operating system may have been corrupted during the update. 2. The first step is to reinstall iOS: perform a clean install via your computer, then restore your data from backup via iCloud.

Okay, I said to myself rather grumpily – maybe I’m just unlucky. But nothing like this has ever happened to me in the past.

But then I tried the whole process on my friend’s iPhone 15 Pro – and repeated a couple of very standard steps in portrait mode (see below), and the phone started heating up rapidly again. (For the record, he hadn’t updated his iPhone yet and thus had one of the older versions).

What is causing the iPhone 15 Pro overheating? A bug in Portrait Mode

If I had to summarize what I observed:
– Overheating is related to advanced Portrait mode editing
– Specifically: if you take a photo in portrait mode and immediately want to make adjustments, everything freezes, usually for up to a few seconds, and the phone starts to heat up very strongly
– if you want to test and replicate this problem (which I’d be happy to do!), here’s the exact procedure: take a photo in Portrait mode. Immediately view the photo and start editing via “Edit”. This is when problems arise, the photo gets stuck, the “Loading” wheel appears, and adjusting the depth of field is similarly problematic.
– my impression/theory: the iPhone seems to have some problem in processing portrait mode data quickly, as if it needs up to a few seconds for routine data preparation (which has never been a problem in the past)
– Of course, I also can’t rule out that Apple support was right: that this is my ” broken” system and that reinstalling it will help. But very similarly, as I mentioned, another iPhone 15 Pro I tested everything with behaved very similarly, so I would rather guess some as yet unfixed software bug on Apple’s side

Do you also have problems with overheating on the iPhone 15 Pro? Let me know!

As you can see, this article is more or less experimental: I’m just describing what happened to me and what’s on my mind. So I don’t know anything for sure. And I will therefore be very happy if you let me know in the comments if you have registered something similar.

Of course, this isn’t an extremely fundamental problem, but a really annoying one nonetheless – a brand new iPhone shouldn’t just get extremelly hot when taking pictures of the Christmas tree!

Let me know!