Apple has admitted that the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max suffer from overheating issues and has pointed to a bug in iOS 17. A solution is in the works, but a new problem has surfaced – wireless charging can damage the NFC module A few isolated cases have been reported so far, but it has occurred so frequently that it cannot be ignored.
A number of people on the MacRumors forums and posters on X have reported problems setting up Apple Pay – when the phone was replaced at an Apple Store, the staff suggested the NFC module was dead.
Finally, people found a possible cause – the problems started after using a wireless charging pad in their BMW. And the phone didn’t just silently suffer damage, in some cases it went into data recovery mode. And it wasn’t just a case of a faulty unit, the replacement phone’s NFC modules also died. According to users, they had no such problem with previous iPhone models.
Reports so far have mostly come from iPhone 15 Pro owners who are driving a BMW, although one user of a 2023 Toyota Supra said their 15 Pro was given up by Apple Pay ghosting.
Our sister site, ArenaEV, just did a review of the BMW i7 xDrive60 and the Android phone used during testing survived. It got hot while charging, but it ran out. Heat might not be an issue, though, as the iPhone 15 Pro Max got pretty hot when we benchmarked it, and it didn’t come off as anything.
If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max and drive a BMW, avoid using the car’s wireless charging, at least until Apple and BMW figure out what’s going wrong. For now it looks like the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus don’t have the same problem, but you might want to play it safe.
