iPhone 15 Pro’s overheating issues have been prominent for a lot of users (including me), and Apple has just released iOS 17.0.3 to fix it.
Recreating situations where I did feel the phone get hot to the touch, I can confirm its been resolved, but I did pose a question earlier this week — would Apple sneakily reduce the performance of A17 Pro?
Now we have the update, and after preliminary testing, I can confirm it’s looking like the company has done so, but the answer is much more complex.
iOS 17.0.3 Geekbench results
To keep it accurate, I ran Geekbench 6 tests again. The testing conditions in my apartment are going to be very different to those in our lab, so I wanted to give the iPhone a fair shake — grabbing a set of results from iOS 17.0.2, and a second set from the 17.0.3 update.
| iOS version | Geekbench 6 single-core | Geekbench 6 multicore |
|---|---|---|
| iOS 17.0.2 | 2950 | 7384 |
| iOS 17.0.3 | 2613 | 7003 |
Of course, this update (as well as updates to Instagram and other apps that seemingly overloaded the system) are important to do to get past the overheating issues. But as you can see, that is a drop of 300 points in both single and multicore results!
Outlook
These numbers tell a very different story to Apple’s claims that it will not fiddle with the A17 Pro’s speed, but wait just one second before you go ahead and accuse the company of lying because I don’t think the Cupertino chums are trying to deceive you.
First of all, these numbers are still dramatically faster than its closest competitors — the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-armed Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and the OnePlus 11. Second, looking at the tests from other publications, the results seem to be all over the shop. You see, these results can vary based on conditions of where the test is done. 9to5Mac’s preliminary results show a far smaller drop, while AppleInsider has seen no drop at all.
But we can only go off the numbers we have, and while you won’t really be feeling the difference in real-world use (these are synthetic benchmarks after all), it looks like the iPhone 15 Pro has been slowed down a touch.