Adam Kos Summer is in full swing and with it we feel our handheld devices heating up. It is not surprising, because modern smartphones have the performance of computers, but unlike them, they do not have any coolers or fans to regulate the temperature (that is, mostly). But how do these devices dissipate the generated heat?
Of course, it doesn't have to be only the summer months, where ambient temperatures play a very big role. Your iPhone and iPad will heat up depending on how you work with them anytime, anywhere. Sometimes more and sometimes less. It is a completely normal phenomenon. There is still a difference between heating and overheating. But here we will focus on the first, namely on how modern smartphones actually cool themselves.
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Chip and battery
The two main hardware components that produce heat are the chip and the battery. But modern phones mostly already have metal frames that simply serve to dissipate unwanted heat. Metal conducts heat well, so it dissipates it away from the internal components right through the phone's frame. That is also why it may seem to you that the device heats up more than you would expect.
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Apple strives for maximum energy efficiency. It uses ARM chips that are based on the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Processing) architecture, which typically requires fewer transistors than x86 processors. As a result, they also need less energy and produce less heat. The chip that Apple uses is abbreviated as SoC. This system-on-a-chip has the advantage of merging all the hardware components together, which makes the distances between them short, which reduces the generation of heat. The smaller the nm process they are produced in, the shorter these distances are.
This is also the case with the iPad Pro and MacBook Air with the M1 chip, which is manufactured using the 5nm process. This chip and all Apple Silicon consumes less power and produces less heat. That's also why the MacBook Air doesn't have to have active cooling, because the vents and the chassis are enough to cool it down. Originally, however, Apple tried it with the 12" MacBook in 2015. Although it contained an Intel processor, it was not very powerful, which is precisely the difference in the case of the M1 chip.
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Liquid cooling in smartphones
But the situation with smartphones with Android is a little different. When Apple tailors everything to its own needs, others have to rely on third-party solutions. After all, Android is also written differently than iOS, which is why Android devices typically need more RAM to run optimally. Recently, however, we have also seen smartphones that do not rely on conventional passive cooling and include liquid cooling.
Devices with this technology come with an integrated tube that contains the cooling liquid. It thus absorbs the excessive heat generated by the chip and changes the liquid present in the tube to steam. Condensation of this liquid helps to dissipate heat and of course lowers the temperature inside the phone. These fluids include water, deionized water, glycol-based solutions, or hydrofluorocarbons. It is precisely because of the presence of steam that it bears the name Vapor Chamber or "steam chamber" cooling.
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The first two companies to use this solution were Nokia and Samsung. In its own version, Xiaomi also introduced it, which calls it Loop LiquidCool. The company launched it in 2021 and claims that it is obviously more effective than anything else. This technology then uses the "capillary effect" to bring the liquid refrigerant to the heat source. However, it is unlikely that we will see cooling in iPhones with any of these models. They are still among the devices with the least amount of internal heating processes.
