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Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

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Re: Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

#231
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching that video, the first thought I have is "So much engineering and I still need to buy a phone case with my new phone?" I'm guessing phone cases are still pretty much required if you drop your phone once or twice a month onto cement/asphalt/marble/etc from pocket height. I would be really curious to hear the internal debate at Apple wrt design tradeoffs + durability. E.g. how much of the iPhone design is only…

Cases are great because everyone can get one that matches their risk level and frequency of drops. Having a sacrificial outer layer that I can replace for $10 is also preferable to letting the $1000 phone take the damage.

But you’ll only ever see the “sacrificial layer,” and never see “real layer,” right? So are you only concerned about protecting against major functional breakage? Or maybe only concerned about resale value?

Re: Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

#232

Can this tech be used for EV batteries?

Vapor chambers and heat pipes are exceptional at moving heat from a relatively small part of them to distribute it around the whole.

This is because the heat dumps into a liquid which is concentrated at the heat source, but as soon as it evaporates it fills the volume in which it’s contained. Also it’s because the evaporation process itself sucks out heat at a rate that’s orders of magnitude faster than via conduction, convection, or radiation alone.

They do not cool though. They rely on the fact that the heat source is relatively small and that something else can pull heat out of them fast enough to re-condense the liquid (and since they distribute the heat that cooling can attach anywhere or everywhere — this is like an embarrassingly parallel problem in software).

In a battery pack there is a lot of surface area that gets relatively and evenly hot, and little room to extract it between the cells. This would likely result in even heating around the heat pipe, which would tend to evaporate all of the liquid inside and do nothing but raise its overall temperature after an initial delay.

What it potentially could be used for is to draw heat out of the battery pack and up to some place where better airflow were possible, or for some active cooling system to extract the heat, but there are problems with scaling up like that (in typical heat pipes they manufacture wicking inner layers to draw the water back even against gravity).

At the points they could be used it’s likely significantly cheaper and easier to control some air or liquid cooling loop through the batteries.

Phones are ideal because a tiny little chip is producing almost all of the heat. It’s not even a lot, it’s just in a small area. Temperature goes up when heat can’t escape, so in this case, spreading the heat around even a few square inches can be a major factor in keeping down the temperature of the CPU/GPU.

Contrast this to EV batteries which are huge and produce evenly distributed heat already; there just isn’t the same value when things are big enough to add cooling systems, when cooling systems are necessary anyway, and when the heat pipe or vapor chamber just adds another piece too the system.

Re: Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With iPhone 17 line the security situation has improved dramatically. I'm not a cybersecurity researcher, but Apple says even nation-state actors will struggle to breach a single device with the newly introduced Memory Integrity Enforcement mechanism. Their research appears legit: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...

> Apple says even nation-state actors will struggle to breach a single device Oh, I remember when they said this about Blastdoor too!

This is very clearly an entirely different class of effort than Blastdoor was/is. They decided that they needed a hardware solution to kill a category of exploits; Apple has a very good track record in this kind of thing.

Re: Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "gravity and concrete are undefeated" is not explanatory. In 25+ years of carrying a naked mobile phone everywhere I've never broken one. My lifestyle theoretically exposes me to significantly greater risk of damage than the average person too. I view phones as semi-disposable devices, so I take no special care or precautions. I am eternally baffled as to why people need cases on their phones. The observation…

For a lot of people, a phone is a major purchase. Why not throw a $30 case on to protect the $1000 device?

If I was going to cover up my phone with a plastic case, I wouldn’t buy a $1,000 device when most of that money is spent on high quality industrial design and appearance.

Re: Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

#235
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watching that video, the first thought I have is "So much engineering and I still need to buy a phone case with my new phone?" You can buy a $400m yacht and still need buoys when you dock it. Unless you want a phone that comes with a pre-installed rubber bumper around the outside, or we have some humanity altering discoveries in transparent materials science, you’re always going to have a case. Gravity and concrete…

I would rather wax my entire body than put a case on the phone

You can have both. YOLO.

Re: Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems wasteful

$120/year on an iPhone 17, or $140/year on Air, Pro, and Pro Max Even for one year that's more than I'd spend to avoid using a phone case, and if I keep it for five years again that's $700. There are other benefits to AppleCare (a case doesn't cover theft or loss) but I'm not very worried about any of them.

AppleCare One is about $240/year and covers three devices. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/07/apple-introduces-appl...

Re: Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

#237
post #230
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go caseless just because of sheer amount of bulk cases add, even the "thin" ones. That's why I use an aramid fiber case from AliExpress. It's paper-thin, but has saved my phone from more drops than can remember. I used to go caseless, but since trying out aramid I don't see any practical benefit to caselessness.

Which one do you recommend?

I think you probably can't go too wrong just searching for 600D aramid + the name of your phone and picking one from a seller with good reviews, but the specific one I have is this: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805920169643.html.

Before that, I was using this one from Thinborne: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHLF8FD7. For all intents and purposes, they're functionally identical. I slightly preferred the style of the AliExpress one (camera glass cover + no logo), but the main reason I went for AliExpress when I needed a replacement was that it was half the price of the Thinborne. (The AliExpress one has since gone up ~$10, but the Thinborne one doesn't appear to be available at all anymore.)

Re: Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

#239
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watching that video, the first thought I have is "So much engineering and I still need to buy a phone case with my new phone?" You can buy a $400m yacht and still need buoys when you dock it. Unless you want a phone that comes with a pre-installed rubber bumper around the outside, or we have some humanity altering discoveries in transparent materials science, you’re always going to have a case. Gravity and concrete…

Saying "gravity and concrete are undefeated" is not explanatory. In 25+ years of carrying a naked mobile phone everywhere I've never broken one. My lifestyle theoretically exposes me to significantly greater risk of damage than the average person too. I view phones as semi-disposable devices, so I take no special care or precautions. I am eternally baffled as to why people need cases on their phones. The observation…

The mistake you’re making is extrapolating your own situation and experience to the rest of the world.

Just because you’ve never damaged a mobile phone, doesn’t mean that no-one else has. Mistakes happen, and modern mobile phones are fragile and dense.

Re: Vapor chamber tech keeps iPhone 17 Pro cool

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a lot of people, a phone is a major purchase. Why not throw a $30 case on to protect the $1000 device?

If I was going to cover up my phone with a plastic case, I wouldn’t buy a $1,000 device when most of that money is spent on high quality industrial design and appearance.

iPhones are expensive devices. You don't have a choice if you are in the Apple ecosystem.
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