iPhone 7 Humiliates Samsung Galaxy S8 in Speed Test

Samsung’s newest Galaxy S8 flagship certainly packs a punch as far as performance goes — but the older iPhone 7 might still be faster.

That isn’t to say the Galaxy S8 is slow by any means, it’s actually incredibly fast with its Snapdragon 835, which packs eight Kryo cores and Adreno 540 graphics (which lets the S8 play GameCube games through an emulator without any dip in performance). In fact, in early benchmark testing, Samsung’s S8 ranked higher than any other current smartphone, including Apple’s older flagship.

Real-world performance is another matter entirely, however, something many tech enthusiasts know all-too-well. In a recent real world speed test performed by YouTube channel EverythingApplePro, Apple’s seven-month-old flagship still managed to beat the Galaxy S8 in a variety of tasks — including opening apps and multitasking. Perhaps most impressive is that the older iPhone 7 managed to process and render a 4K video in about half the time it took the Samsung S8 to do the same. See the video below.

This is indeed another case of a Samsung phone looking better on paper than it performs in the real world (something we’ve seen a lot of with Samsung’s recent flagships). While the iPhone 7’s chipset has fewer cores and overall slower clock speed than Qualcomm’s newest Snapdragon chip, Apple’s proprietary, quad-core A10 Fusion chipset still packs enough punch to rank the iPhone 7 as one of the most powerful smartphones currently available.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Apple optimizes its software and hardware to work in sync with each other — something that’s hard to do with Android phones, since that ecosystem is fragmented into a plethora of different manufacturers. Which results in the need for a much more powerful Android device to keep up with an iPhone. Of course, it’s worth noting that you won’t exactly notice the speed difference unless you have both handsets side-by-side performing the same task.

So while the Samsung S8 is certainly a fast and snappy phone with seriously impressive benchmark specs, if real-world performance is the only thing you’re after, the iPhone 7 might be the better choice in the long run.