It has come to my attention some people believe little changes between the iPhone generations. People believe this because Apple rarely makes drastic changes to the outward appearence of their Phones. However, they really change a lot of hardware under the hood. I thought I would post some benchmarks of modern day iPhones including up too the new iPhone 5S. I used Futuremark’s 3DMark and Primate Labs Geekbench 3. Here are my results:
You may notice there is little gain from the iPhone 4 to the 4S. This because the iPhone 4S was the first iPhone to include a dual-core CPU. You will see the change in the multi-core test. That is where you see the 4S pull away, as well as every other phone.
3DMark is a great benchmark for gaming performance. The 5S impresses here:
I would have included some Android handsets for an all out shootout but after reading some articles online (namely AnandTech), many Android manufacturers have been cheating on benchmark apps.
What conclusions can we make from this data? From a first look Apple phones look very similar. Apple really tries to offer it’s latest iOS to the oldest device possible (with iOS 7 they finally just dropped support for the iPhone 3GS!). However the advances they make year over year on hardware is quite noticeable (excluding the 5C). These tests alone show that they more than double the performance (sometimes triple!) from release to release.
So what about the 5C? It’s an iPhone 5 in a new cover. Don’t upgrade from your 5 to a 5C, it’s a waste of time and money.
What is exciting is the the iPhone 5S delivers the first 64-bit mobile architecture to the table. This truly is the beginning of a new era of smartphones and tablets.
(Thanks go to Nick, Kenny, James, and Wojo for helping me get some of the scores needed for the review)
LanningTech 