Is there anything I can do about completely unpredictable overheating?

A few years ago I bought the 12 Pro Max, I never had a problem with it and kept it until well after the 14 Pro max came out. In the last few months I used it for after one of the software updates it started to randomly get pretty hot - sometimes when charging, sometimes when seemingly doing nothing.

Because of that and a broken screen I decided to get an iPhone 14 Pro Max right at the end of 2022. Pretty much immediately I had exactly the same problem. I am not saying it gets so hot that it’s on the brink of exploding, but it is very uncomfortable to hold and genuinely feels like it is cooking your fingertips very slowly if you have them there too long. The battery exploding does feel like a genuine concern, because it’s hard to imagine the components and battery being happy in there at this temperature, it often entirely freezes the phone, closes apps, sometimes the phone will force restart and I can’t use it for a few minutes - despite all of that I have never had the warning about the phone overheating.

A few months ago, I got ANOTHER iPhone 14 Pro Max on apple care due to a crack in the screen. It is EXACTLY the same. It gets incredibly hot, this causes the battery to drain much faster (but according to battery health it’s still 100%), apps freeze, basic features stop working or work inconsistently, phone restarts itself.

Before the iPhone 12 I was always an android user. What drew me to iOS was that the ecosystem is well restricted, well managed and had really great performance. Yes, you couldn’t do everything you could do on an android, but everything it could do it did very well, with no hiccups.

These days it just seems like problem after problem with iPhone. Ive had 5-6 android phones, I’ve never had one that heated up as much as my 12 or 14 pro max, drained its battery life so incredibly quickly, while having such an extreme lack of any kind of diagnostic or monitoring tools whatsoever.

I’m honestly perplexed, the chips are meant to have got a lot better, but every time I buy an iPhone in the next generation for a little more than the last time - the same price as some second hand hatchbacks - the care that’s gone into it seems so much worse that any performance improvements are completely overshadowed by so, so many software issues.

What I really want to know is if there is anything I can even do to look into this even slightly and figure out what is causing the overheating. Is iOS just completely locked shut? I don’t want to go around enabling and disabling various services, having no idea if any of them are doing anything to help. It’s painful. They may say the phone isn’t getting hot enough to cause damage but I very much doubt that, it feels very uncomfortable to hold and like the perfect cooking temperature to make sure this phone lasts a maximum of 1-2 years at anything close to advertised performance, then conveniently get much slower which will be put down to “protecting the hardware” which has been absolutely battered by a complete lack of temperature controls, when my 12 felt like it would last forever before I switched.

FYI, I do not and have never used a case on my iPhone. I can only imagine how much worse this would be with one.

As I have been writing just this thread, the only other thing I’m doing being listening to music on Bluetooth headphones, my phone has progressively heated up more and more. The sides feel about the same temperature I heat milk up to when I’m making a latte. Why? Why is running one website and listening to a song so intensive on this supposedly incredibly powerful chip that it’s completely maxxing out the phones performance?

iPhone 12 (when, in my view, this issue was first introduced):

Overheating iPhone 12 Pro Max - Apple Community

iPhone 13: https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/s/SJ5PzNCYQD

iPhone 13 Overheating after iOS Update - Apple Community

This is an absolutely tiny subset of links, you can find as many as you could dream of on google.

[Edited by Moderator]