As with nearly every tech release recently, especially those from Apple, it appears that there is a bit of a “heat-gate” brewing when it comes to the new iPad 3. Many of the 3 million people who’ve already purchased the device are indicating that the lower lefthand corner of the tablet gets extremely hot after using the device for awhile – sometimes to hot to even touch. The initial hope is that after you learn how to jailbreak iPad 3 and apply this to the tablet, someone will eventually come up with a bug fix in Cydia that fixes the issue.
Many people who paid hundreds of dollars for their new iPad 3 are taking to the apple forums to vent their frustrations about the heat issues. Even consumer reports has jumped into the fray, saying that in their testing, the new iPad 3 seems to run much hotter than the iPad 2 did, particularly when running a resource intensive application such as a game. Their tests showed that the new iPad 3 reached temperatures up to 116 F. By comparison, the iPad 2 only got up to about 102 F when running a resource intensive game.
Some say that it’s much ado about nothing, since the heat seems to emanate from just one corner of the device, and doesn’t make the iPad 3 jailbreak unusable. Consumer Reports noted that even at the device’s hottest, when playing a game, the heat wasn’t unbearable, and you could still hold onto the device. It just tended to make your hands a bit sweaty. Many expect perfection from Apple though, especially when they’ve just spent several hundred dollars on a new device. People over the last few years have come to see Apple as some kind of corporate savior, with Steve Jobs as a beneficent messiah who died for our tech sins. And as such, these fanboys and girls are not willing to tolerate anything less than perfection from the company.
SlashGear’s Vincent Nguyen said he did notice the heat issue, when he was given an advance copy of the device to test and review, but ”Nothing anywhere near uncomfortable to hold.” Apple’s only response was to say that the device operate “inside our normal thermal specifications”.
Some inside the jailbreak community are split as to whether doing an iPad 3 jailbreak 5.1 helps, hurts, or does neither when it comes to “heat gate”. Some have indicated that a jailbreak takes some of the resource drain off of the battery in some unexpected way, and that when they learned how to jailbreak iPad 3 iOS 5.1, the heat problem went away. Others insist that once you jailbreak new iPad, the processor drain seems even more intensive due perhaps to some sloppy code from the jailbreakers. One gentleman from Ann Arbor, Michigan who had done a jailbreak was interviewed on the subject. His name was Gary V. Thompson, and he indicated that he made a living as a test subject for novel pharmaceuticals at the college of human science at the University of Michigan. He said that after he did a jailbreak on his new iPad 3, he noticed that the heat got much worse. He used a thermometer from inside one of the university labs to test the device, and found that the heat was up to 139 degrees F. Whether or not he’s a trustworthy person is up for debate.
Have you been able to jailbreak iPad 3 iOS 5.1? Have you found any problems with heat? What do you think?
