We Melted iPhones for Science - Apple Just Spent $10B Proving We Were Right
33 comments
·September 11, 2025joshstrange
Lalabadie
The post ends up somewhat of a caricature about how founders turn everything around them into something about them.
sillyfluke
I understood it to be a throwaway estimate for the cost of apple building out a specialized chip architecture that can handle excessive workloads from transformer based AI apps.
llm_nerd
We posted the same thing, in essence, at the same time. This piece is completely nonsensical in every way, and I presume it is targeted at laymen who'll just go along with it. Like anyone who sees that last bit about MLX and CoreML and doesn't realize the author seems to not have a clue what they're talking about should understand they're being duped.
Apple adopted a new cooling technique on their highest end device to differentiate and give spec sheet chasers something to be hyped about. It should help reduce throttling for the very odd event where someone is running a mobile device at 100% continuously (which is actually super rare in normal usage). It's already in the Pixel 9 Pro, for instance, and is a new "must have". It has nothing to do with whatever app these guys were building.
The rest of the nonsense is just silly. If you are building an app for a mobile device and it pegs the CPU and GPU, you're going to have a bad time. That's the moment you realize it's time to go back to the drawing board.
MediaSquirrel
Our app wasn't running on CPU or GPU –– the actual software we built was running entirely on Apple Neural Engine and it was crazy fast because we designed the architecture explicitly to run that specific chip.
We were just calling the iPhone's built-in face tracking system via the Vision Framework to animate the avatars. That's the thing that was running on GPU.
llm_nerd
Okay, though I'm not sure what that has to do with my comment. I understood that from the post: you were concurrently maxing out multiple parts of the SoC and it was overheating as they all contributed to the thermal load. This isn't new or novel -- benchmarks that saturate both the CPU and GPU are legendary for throttling -- though the claim that somehow normal thermal management didn't protect the hardware is novel, albeit entirely unsubstantiated.
That is neither here nor there on CoreML -- which also uses the CPU, GPU, and ANE, and sometimes a combination of all of them -- or the weird thing about MLX.
nashashmi
Keeping the apple denialism aside, one startup finds a bug in the software, The company doesn’t want to admit it (like antennaGate) and then goes about solving the problem.
It strikes me as troublesome that a company that found a bug could be banned from the App Store and the rep talks about it as killing the company.
joshstrange
> It strikes me as troublesome that a company that found a bug could be banned from the App Store and the rep talks about it as killing the company.
Yes, all of that would be troublesome... if it were true. Given the rest of the post's content I'm leaning pretty heavily towards "made up". This whole thing reads like "Am I the Asshole" or similar subreddits which are 99% outlets for fiction writers.
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badc0ffee
> Apple built a liquid cooling system for phones.
It's really just a heat pipe - vapour trapped inside copper, not circulating liquid to a radiator.
oakwhiz
The vapor does recondense into a liquid which is why they usually have a very rough and porous inner surface texture. But you're right that there isn't meaningful circulation, just convection.
gardnr
The claims are incredible:
“at 60fps in HD resolution. In real-time. On iPhone. In 2021.”
“5ms latency”
“512 x 512 pixel resolution per video”
I don’t mean to be rude but I’m having trouble convincing myself this is a real story.
MediaSquirrel
I can see why you'd be skeptical. It was pretty insane what we did.
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llm_nerd
This is such an odd submission, and a lot of the claims are bizarre and seemingly nonsensical. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding. Exchanges in it seem remarkably...fictional. It reads like a tosser peacocking LinkedIn post by someone desperately trying to scam some rubes.
It also seems like one of those self-aggrandizing things that tries to spin everything as a reaction to themselves, instead of just technology progressing. No, vapour chamber cooling isn't some grand admission, it's something that a variety of makers have been adopting to reduce throttling as a spec-sheet item of their top end devices. It isn't all about you.
And given that the base 17 doesn't have VCC, I guess Apple isn't "admitting" it at all, no?
And the CoreML v MLX nonsense at the end is entirely nonsensical and technically ignorant. Like, wow.
No one should learn anything from this piece. The author might know what they're talking about (though I am doubtful), but this pieces was "how to make an Apple event about ourselves" and it's pretty ridiculous.
minimaxir
> And given that the base 17 doesn't have VCC, I guess Apple isn't "admitting" it at all, no?
It will be fun to see how hot the iPhone Air gets since it has the same chip as the 17 Pro (w/ one fewer GPU core), but a less thermally conductive metal and no vapor chamber.
joshstrange
I imagine it will be a lot like the MacBook Air, in that it just thermal throttles faster. It has the same chip as the Pro but will never seen the same _sustatined_ performance.
llm_nerd
This will be one of those situations where we'll really miss Anandtech. Still can't believe that site died.
In the real world I doubt anyone will ever notice the difference, VCC or not. VCC only will materially affect usage when someone is doing an activity that will hit throttling, which is actually extraordinarily rare in normal use, and usually only comes into play in benchmarking. The overwhelming majority of time we peg those cores for a tiny amount of time and get a quick Animoji or text-extraction from an image, and so on. Even the "AI" usage on a mobile device is extremely peaky.
renewiltord
tl;dr This guy's AI software couldn't run on iPhones without damaging them. That's an iOS/iPhone bug. He believes Apple just put in a more advanced cooling solution into their latest phones because new AI software requires more cooling for the chips.
The whole thing is written in a bombastic storytelling style that is typical of LinkedIn threads. If this is entertaining to you, this is the link for you since it has actual image examples of their model output varying between platforms.
moralestapia
What an absolute ass was that Apple engineer ...
datadrivenangel
For an off the books meeting with someone who was concerned about getting banned, that seems like a lot of candor. Perfectly reasonable.
omgwtfbyobbq
My experience is limited, but no one I've engaged with at Apple has ever admitted fault for anything. I think it's a liability/culture thing.
moralestapia
I hope we both get surrounded by the kind of people each of us prefer :)
jdpage
I might be wrong here, but based on the context, I read the "I don't want to know about your names or your company" as CYA for both parties: "I can't be legally obligated to disclose things I don't know, so please don't tell me anything you don't want Apple to know. I can't say that outright, though, so instead I'm going to say something that could be reasonably read as 'I'm busy and don't want to hear your pitch'".
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827a
The feeling I get reading that is that you shouldn't interpret that conversation as a verbatim quotation. Even though the author did everything possible to make it seem like it was verbatim; a hunch I get reading the entire thing is that its summarized and viewed through the author's eyes.
E.g. maybe they actually said some variation of "your app is bricking iPhones? how did you get through app store review..." and the author interpreted it as "squashing his company like a bug".
jama211
He did an hour of technical discussions, and found the issue. It’s not his fault apple makes him sign an employment secrecy contract so strict he has to be that careful or lose his job.
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nashashmi
He was a part of Apple. So by default he was an …
But he was pretty professional in the way he went about it, “no names, no company”. And “You found a security bug! Show me. But you won’t get credit”
dmoy
The engineer (second convo) or the PM (first convo)?
renewiltord
It's obviously exaggerated for humor. Has no one ever told anyone else a story before? No one talks like this.
"Off-the-books" meetings are just friend-based connections. I got a bug in the Linux nvidia driver fixed that was affecting me by just hitting up an old friend. I could write that story as him saying "Keep this top-secret" if I wanted because that's just fun storywriting.
MediaSquirrel
OP here: I can see why you'd think "this can't possibly be real," but I assure you that the story is real, not exaggerated. I was there.
I cannot follow this post at all. Where does $10B come from? It's never mentioned aside from the tagline.
I'm also trying to understand what OASIS was really supposed to do that was going to.... uh... matter? It's a video chat app where you can be someone else in the video. Ok, that's cool but I'm failing to see how this is groundbreaking.
> Her: "Wait, haven't we banned you from the App Store? Why haven't we killed your company already?"
> Me: "We... haven't exactly told anyone at Apple about this."
> Her: "You're a mosquito. Apple will just stomp on you and you will not exist."
Told Apple what? That they have a bug? Why would they ban you from the app store? Why would someone say "You're a mosquito. Apple will just stomp on you and you will not exist.", it makes zero sense to me given the context laid out here.
Lastly, did Apple fix the problem? They made changes but we won't know anything for sure until next Friday at the very earliest.
Seems like a lot of name dropping (why should I care about a big name that didn't invest in you?) and big numbers ($10B, never explained) for a failed startup.
> You can be right about the future and still fail in the present.
Not clear at all what OASIS was "right" about really.
> Apple's A19 Pro isn't just a chip announcement. It's a confession. An admission. A vindication.
Ok, sure. If you say so.
Lastly, what were you "right" about? That iPhones can get hot?
Just none of this makes any sense or seems very interesting IMHO.