William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele
An unknown number of iPhone 15 Pro Max owners are finding the image of home screen apps being burnt-in to the display, but the issue doesn't appear to be any worse than any other year.
Burn-in may be best known from the old days of CRT screens, but it has been an issue with OLED displays. In any case, burn-in is typically something that typically happens after a very long time with the same images being shown on the screen.
Now, however, a month after the iPhone 15 range went on sale, users of the iPhone 15 Pro Max are reporting issues on Reddit and in Apple's support forums, as first spotted by iMore. It's not a widespread problem, and it's not known whether it also affects the iPhone 15 Pro.
"Most cases of burn-in in televisions is a result of static images or on-screen elements displaying on the screen uninterrupted for many hours or days at a time - with brightness typically at peak levels," OLED manufacturer LG says, "So, it is possible to create image retention in almost any display if one really tries hard enough."
AppleInsider has been collecting data from many sources across Apple's service chain since 2015. From that data, so far, the absolute number of OLED burn-in reports from Apple Service data in mid-October year-over-year is less than it has been for the last three years. This could be attributed to different release timings, but ultimately, there is not a statistically significant deviance of failures.
That doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a problem, and that data is cold-comfort to anyone suffering from the issue. As with any of these reports on social media of problems, AppleInsider recommends getting any issue documented with Apple. The company does not respond to social media complaints, and will only take action with data from its service chain.
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
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12 Comments
With 2400 nits brightness, someone must have left it on for a week to be able to report this.
Or perhaps beach and phone competing with the sun don’t mix well.
“Only affects small number of users”
I see a *lot* of users who have their screen set WAY too bright AND appear to have turned off display sleep entirely, sticking this giant expensive glow stick back into their pocket or bag with nary a thought.
One fellow stuck his phone (screen still on) in his back pocket on a walk I was also on. I was behind him for 15 minutes and his screen was visible from a block away the entire time. This will, of course, also happen to Android users who override the default screen dimming settings.
I’d expect a display timer set to “never” plus max brightness would lead to that. Physics just rules.