Apple’s New iPad 3 Overheating En Masse?

The latest incarnation of Apple’s iPad could be classed as a radiator if reports from aggravated users across Apple’s forums are to be believed with the device becoming “too hot to handle” after just 10 minutes of gaming use. For it’s part Apple have said that the device operates ” well within our thermal specifications”, but at 33.6 degrees celsius (92.5 Fahrenheit) it is over five degrees hotter than the original under normal use – get that “amazing” quad-core chip running, however, and things really start to heat up.

Consumer Reports did a little investigating and found the new iPad’s hotspot to be the graphics processor found at the lower left side of the device – and managed to get the heat up to 47 degrees celsius (116 degrees fahrenheit) as you can see in the image below.

Under normal use most users will find only a small increase in temperature, but when used intensively for gaming, that extra quad-core GPU power Apple squeezed into the new iPad does noticeably heat things up. With three million sold in the first three days, a few teething issues are to be expected – but we don’t now how common this issue is as yet. What we do know, is that browsing the internet is no faster on the iPad 3 than the iPad 2 – so the GPU improvements are really only noticeable when gaming, which is when the device gets hot.