A vapor chamber may sound like a disappointing WWE pay-per-view, but it's actually an important addition to the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max. It may even prove one of the most consequential upgrades Apple made to its phones this year.
If you're not familiar with what this is, a vapor chamber is a sealed cavity filled with a network of metal strands and a small amount of fluid, in the iPhone 17 Pro's case, deionized water. When the phone heats up, the water evaporates, moving to the far side of the chamber where it's cooler, taking some heat energy with it. The water then condenses again as it cools, where it then flows to the warmer part again, where the cycle repeats.
The result is the same heat generated by the phone's chipset being spread over a wider area. And that's a good thing because it means you're less likely to find an uncomfortably hot spot on the phone, and the chip doesn't have to throttle its performance down to avoid overheating.
Apple's decision to move from a titanium frame to an aluminum one also helps here. The unibody design means the heat can spread across the whole phone more easily.
This is why Apple is emphasizing improvements to sustained performance, as well as increased peak performance with the A19 Pro chip. Maximum potential power is one thing, but being able to use that power to use more often is just as important similar to the benefits a four-wheel-drive car has compared to a two-wheel-drive one.
An upgrade almost a decade in the making
As you may have guessed, I'm excited to see what the addition of a vapor chamber will mean for gaming or work on iPhones. But I'm also a mix of relieved and frustrated on the iPhone's behalf, because the best Android phones have been using vapor chambers for years at this point, and smartphone geeks have been waiting for Apple to catch up.
Samsung introduced its first vapor chamber-cooled smartphone, the Galaxy S7 in 2016. OnePlus first added a vapor chamber to the OnePlus 9 Pro in 2021, while Google, somewhat late to the party, introduced vapor chambers to the Pixel 9 Pro models last year.
Apple is known for taking its time to adopt new features (AI and Apple Intelligence perhaps excluded). Note how we still don't have an iPhone Fold, or how Apple only just introduced its 120Hz ProMotion display tech to its basic iPhone 17 model, after even budget Android phones have offered such speeds for the past four or so years. So it doesn't surprise me that it's taken almost ten years for Apple to adopt a vapor chamber cooling system, even if I wish it had done so sooner.
Apple's latest iPhones are often the highest-performing phones available at any given time. But that historic lead has been shrinking of late, with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip found in this year's top Android handsets proving capable of beating the iPhone 16 Pro and its A18 Pro chip on some tests. Plus, the iPhone's been known to be a little hot to handle when under severe processing loads for several generations, while rival devices are perfectly usable even at maximum processing.
We're still testing the iPhone 17 series to see what performance is like outside of the demo area at the Steve Jobs Theater. I've not even had the chance to handle one yet. But I have high hopes for the iPhone 17 Pro's benchmark and endurance scores as a result of the vapor chamber's introduction. It's an update likely worth waiting for, even if the new design, reworked cameras and improved battery and charging are more eye-catching on a specs sheet.
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