Having spent a good day or so getting acquainted with the new iPad, I’ve started to notice that the iPad 3 can get noticeably warm. In under ten minutes of video playback, the area to the right of iPad logo becomes warm. It’s not as if you could fry an egg, at least not in my case, but it’s not something that occurred on the iPad 2. Having watched multiple full-length shows in a single viewing session, I never experienced any sort of change in temperature.
A quick look into Apple’s own forums reveals a number of folks with similar findings.
Just got my new iPad. I’m loving the screen and speed but there’s something weird about it. It gets rather warm/hot after 30minutes of usage. It has never happened on my iPad 2.
Mines left hand side . Opposite to where speakeris, and ita hard uncomfortable , pretty hot after 30 ,Mins
Here’s something else odd: Mine has been in the dock since I opened the box. It’s charging and restoring my previous iPad’s backup, so gigs and gigs of stuff is being installed. It was warm on the bottom left. Not hot, as I said, but warm enough that I noticed and was surprised.
Mine is also getting pretty hot. I’ve got the 32 gb wifi model. It’s not too hot to hold yet, but it seems to be getting hotter the more it’s on. The heat on mine is concentrated on the bottom-left (if you’re holding it with the home button at the bottom) although the whole left side seems to be hotter than the right side.
Is this an isolated issue affecting just a few folks? It might simply be that this iPad runs hotter due to the increase battery needed to power all those retina display pixels. Getting warm is not necessarily a terrible thing, but certainly a change from the prior generation iPad.
Is your new iPad hot stuff?
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necessarily -> not necessarily
Yep, the logic board is on the left (when looking at the iPad from the front, with the home button on the bottom)
http://guide-images.ifixit.net/igi/YM5S6YkHK6SSbdo2.huge
It looks like the A5X is just 1/3rd of the way from the bottom of the board, so that is probably where it is getting the hottest.
http://guide-images.ifixit.net/igi/5VZLEaG1s1p62ctH.huge
It makes sense that it is hotter. It has twice as many GPU cores and those cores are getting hammered with 2048×1536 rendering. Plus, the report of twice as many backlights can’t be helping matters much.