29 September 2017

Tom’s Guide: iPhone 8 is World’s Fastest Phone (It’s Not Even Close)

If you’re wondering how all this translates to real-world performance, we have more good news for iPhone 8 shoppers — and bad news for everyone else. To really put the A11 Bionic chip through its paces, we put the same 2-minute video, shot in 4K by a drone, on the iPhone 8, Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S8+, and then added the same transitions and effects before exporting and saving the video.

The iPhone 8 finished this strenuous task in just 42 seconds, while the Note 8 took more than 3 minutes. The Galaxy S8+ took more than 4 minutes.

Mark Spoonauer

Sounds impressive, but is this really a representative situation, a task regularly performed by users on their smartphones? I doubt 1% of global smartphone users even own a drone, let alone use their phones to edit 4K footage. For every-day tasks like messaging, selfies, checking Facebook and Instagram, the difference should be barely noticeable. As with desktops and laptops years ago, smartphones are entering the phase in which hardware improvements have less and less impact on perceived performance and user experience; and as a consequence, people are replacing their devices less frequently.

iPhone 8 benchmark performance

And, truth be told, if you take other details into consideration, the overall iPhone experience is slowly degrading. Unlike before, when the iPhone was a single ‘flagship’, you now have a choice between the stale, four-year-old design, and a redesigned, but more expensive model (I personally think it looks horrible) – the two have basically the same specs. Neither has a headphone jack, so you are pushed into buying expensive wireless headphones. Both models support wireless charging and fast charging, but neither comes with the proper charger in the box, meaning another purchase of accessories you didn't need before. iOS is dumbing down with each new release, to the point that now Control Center buttons don’t even work like proper on-off switches anymore. And so on.

Ironically, the same site has another article proclaiming that the Galaxy Note 8 is better that the iPhone 8 Plus. So there’s that.

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