Out of the blue it kind of died…
I’ve been running my iPhone 15 Pro Max for almost a year now and on the whole, I’ve been happy with it with precious few niggles or complaints.
It was only a few weeks ago I wrote my long-term review about it which on the whole was pretty positive.
But out of the blue last Sunday it let me down pretty badly – and I’m trying to figure out what has happened. This may not be the longest story, but I thought a problem shared…
An away day
I was lucky enough to be invited to The Concours of Elegance which is a collection of the most gorgeous rare and exotic collectable cars set at Hampton Court Palace. It’s just a brilliant day out.
I decided not to take any kit with me other than a gimbal and my year-old (nearly) iPhone 15 Pro Max. Although I wasn’t treating it as a workday (creators are always sniffing out an opportunity) I knew that it would be a fantastic chance to give the cameras one last hurrah before the iPhone 16s land in a couple of weeks.
The camera setup on the 15 Pro Max is undoubtedly the best yet with seven focal lengths sitting in your pocket with the only limit being your creativity. The more you delve and play with the camera settings you start to release the power of the phone and truly bring to life the meaning of the term shot on iPhone.
Through the course of the story, I’ll drop in some shots from the day to give you both a flavour of the experience and the capabilities of the 15 Pro Max.
iPhone 15 Pro Max at work
Annoyingly I had not intended to make content about the day – as I’ve said. I’d kind of promised myself a day off. But as the day unfolded a story began to develop which is why I’m here today writing about the events at Hampton Court.
There are no screenshots of what I’m about to tell you – so you’ll just have to take my word that I’m not telling you a sack full of lies! I left home around midday with 100% battery.
I did use the phone in the car but only for streaming music, no satnav and it was only a short 30 or 40-minute drive anyway. To give you the full picture it was a warm day – well by U.K. standards anyway…it was about 25 degrees which is bordering on tropical for us! The other detail was that a few days before I had updated to iOS 17.6.1.
So armed with all the background info let’s get into the meat of the story.
In that year’s review I mentioned that although I heard all sorts of stories about iPhone 15 getting hot, I’d had no issues – turns out I spoke too soon!
The iPhone that day began roasting hot. Not quite at the point where you couldn’t hold it but uncomfortably, noticeably and worryingly warm. The screen started to dim a little which in the bright sunny day posed problems of its own and I was struggling with data.
The phone was telling me that I had 3 bars of 5G but I could barely do anything with the phone. I couldn’t open the banking apps and one spreadsheet I needed to look at wouldn’t play ball either. My guess is the hotter the phone got the modem was being throttled and that is what was affecting the data.
The friends I was with were fine – without exception, all were on older phones and older OS – all of them were able to get online and be about their normal business. I was certainly the butt of many jokes as you can imagine!
Feeling the heat
The battery was starting to drain in front of my eyes. By the time I left the event at about 5.30 pm, the battery was at 12%. I’d gone from 100% to 12% in 6 hours on a year old flagship iPhone.
I tried rebooting a few times and shut down all the background apps – from memory I think there were about 12 or 15 apps open but nothing seemed to be helping with either cooling the phone down or slowing down the power dump I was experiencing.
Something clearly wasn’t right, but I couldn’t fathom what. I don’t like buying into conspiracy theories but was there something in the myth that Apple slows down old iPhones as the new models are about to be released? Was 17.6.1 buggy? Was there an app I was using with some dodgy coding?
Checking on my battery health – I’d say it’s kind of average with 262 charging cycles and a maximum capacity of 90%. I have Optimised Charging enabled but don’t restrict it to 80% as I know I’ll only be using the phone for a year.
An app I often use is Final Cut Camera and I can see that has a big impact on the battery but on Sunday I wasn’t using it. And that is the point of this story – it’s worth reminding you I wasn’t doing anything particularly taxing on the phone.
I wasn’t shooting log or Pro Res – I was hardly shooting any video at all. I was hardly using any AI. From memory, the only AI I used all day was CapCut to add some captions to a short I shot. I eventually managed to get some data later in the day and uploaded that short to YouTube and Insta – but that was about the most taxing work I carried out all day.
What’s to come
We know that Apple Intelligence is going to play a pretty big part in iOS 18 and iPhone 16 and we also know that AI is power-hungry and processor-thirsty. To that point, all iPhone 16s will be getting 8 GB of memory as that is the minimum requirement for Apple intelligence. But with all that said my concern is this – if iPhones are struggling already with the battery are we in for a rough ride this year?
In the Pro Max, there is talk of battery stacking technology being used and also a graphene heat sink. It sounds like they are aware of the issues that AI may be bringing along with it and it sounds as if they are trying to get ahead of the curve. Turns out my theory that the titanium they use on the Pros now looks and feels great, but sucks at dispersing heat wasn’t far from the mark.
One bad day doesn’t ruin a good year. I’ve got plenty of use out of my iPhone 15 Pro Max and from a creative point of view it took some great shots at various focal lengths throughout the day and once again showed me just how powerful and versatile these phones are. And that’s before we even start talking about the almost pro-quality video you shoot on this thing.
So, in short, your guess is as good as mine as to what went on with my iPhone last weekend. Since then I’ve been studio-based and near chargers so I have no way of knowing if it was a one-off or if everything is now back to normal.
Thinking back to earlier this year, I did have a similar kind of situation with my Apple Watch. The day after an update the battery drained super quickly. Maybe some indexing goes on in the background after an update – who knows?
It’s just a shame that the 15’s final sign-off will be a bad experience when for the most part I’ve had a great run with it.
iPhone 16 Pro Max – impress me! I’m here for the taking!
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