Everybody always talks about the massive computing power of smartphones (movies love the moon mission comparison) but still my phone rarely gets hot. (Only when I use it while charging sometimes)
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It’s helpful to understand where the heat is coming from. In electronics, energy is converted to work in the form of computation. This process isn’t 100% efficient though. Some portion of the energy is wasted. That waste energy comes in the form of heat energy.
Mobile electronics are designed to be incredibly efficient, and they draw less power to begin with. So the amount of waste heat energy generated is very small. It’s small enough that we can simply let it dissipate through the phone case.
You might also have heard about the growth of computing power. Your example of smartphones versus the Apollo mission computers is a great comparison. This increase in power is owed to the fact that we’re able to manufacture processors with increasingly smaller internal components. As the components get smaller, they require less total energy, but the density of their energy per square centimeter may still go up.
In recent years, the demand for mobile computing has driven an entirely new metric: computing power per watt of energy. Put simply, manufacturers like Samsung and Apple have a tremendous incentive to deliver A) a lot of computing power and B) long battery life, because that’s what consumers want.
So over the last couple of decades, massive amounts of research & development has gone into designing chips with lower energy consumption per unit of computing power. The result are chips that can do more work with far less energy than old computers. This means less waste heat.
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