It wouldn’t surprise me if humidity were a piece of it–here in the US northeast I’ve always found the iPhone boxes to be aggravatingly sticky. I wind up jiggling it all around and prying at it with my fingernails.
It’s no longer the case, but for a long time my iPhones were pretty bad about reconnecting to the cell network when emerging from the NYC subway, which always struck me as a little bit of evidence of its California roots–given the polish of the device overall, it surely would never have been so janky in that situation if a majority of their employees experienced it each day on their way to work!
I think Apple or Qualcomm must have done something about that exact use case in one of the last updates: It’s been a while since I’ve had to do that. My iPhone now finds the network in the station pretty consistently.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if they did something like using the accelerometer as an input to the baseband for triggering a quick network scan after a rapid deceleration when on a train without signal.
Or maybe newer networks are just more predictable for phones to reconnect to quickly without draining the battery?
It’s no longer the case, but for a long time my iPhones were pretty bad about reconnecting to the cell network when emerging from the NYC subway, which always struck me as a little bit of evidence of its California roots–given the polish of the device overall, it surely would never have been so janky in that situation if a majority of their employees experienced it each day on their way to work!