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The iPhone 12 lineup has just come out with stylish MagSafe apps like iPhone 12 cases, wallets, and wireless chargers, but in the future, a clip-on accessory could intelligently cool your Apple smartphone, perhaps the iPhone 13, while heating up. processing power.
That is according to a patent recently awarded to Apple, which describes a case that is magnetically attached to a phone and acts as a cooling layer that absorbs heat. When the phone detects the case, either by detecting the magnetic field or, in other versions, via an RFID or NFC signal, the phone allows it to heat up, presumably beyond normal tolerances.
In essence, the case could act as an external cooling layer for a purposely overheated phone. Organized!
This is obviously just a patent, with lots of variations on how it might work and there’s no certainty that Apple will integrate it in a future case, let alone in a planned sequence to allow iPhones to outsource cooling to an outer shell. Not only is it risky, it’s out of place for Apple, which long ago fused a product philosophy of standalone, unchangeable devices.
Which means it could open up the iPhone 13 or other phones to much more interesting possibilities.
MagSafe opens the door
When viewed as a solution for securing wireless chargers to phones, MagSafe is overkill. But third-party products are already exploring what the feature is capable of, to begin with, as a mount for grips and camera-type tripods.
We’ve seen clip-on back accessories on phones before, namely the Moto Mods, which enhanced the Moto Z line of phones with a speaker, battery, camera, and other accessories. The downside, of course, was forcing all successive phones to keep the same size to be compatible, but MagSafe only clips into the middle of the iPhone 12, which means we could see years of innovative accessories that won’t hamper the future. of the iPhone. design.
More interesting is the possibility of expanding the performance of the iPhone essentially by outsourcing its cooling to an even more intense case or accessory. In the patent, Apple is essentially recognizing the limits of phones to cool down, which could cause components to fail by melting solder connections or “failure of metal structures within an integrated circuit.”
Gaming phones have introduced their own solutions for performance-related heat such as giant cooling chambers and graphene foil conductors in the Razer Phone 2 and Asus ROG 3. Heck, ROG phones have turned to external clip-on fans for cool phones for years. This Apple solution isn’t just a novel idea, it’s a possibility for phones to exceed the limits of the phone’s form factor, which is necessarily much more sealed to waterproof than easier-to-cool personal computing setups.
It’s a solution that other brands could emulate, although they might skip copying Apple’s MagSafe feature and go straight to the cooling boxes.
Via AppleInsider
