This iPhone 6 vs iPhone XS Speed Test Yields Some Surprising Results

You’d expect a new iPhone to be faster than an older iPhone, but a new speed test suggests that may not be the case across the board.

The speed test, posted by Nick Ackerman, pitted an iPhone XS against an iPhone 6 in a couple of areas. All in all, it’s a pretty routine display of real-world performance differences. But there’s something interesting about it.

Early on in the video, Ackerman attempted to open the Camera app from the Lock screen on both devices. And, amazingly, the four-year-old iPhone 6 actually beat Apple’s latest and greatest.

The iPhone 6 consistently opened the Camera app just a hair faster than its newer counterpart. It’s not clear why this is, but it may be due to the significant performance boosts Apple introduced to older devices in iOS 12.

It also demonstrates something else: Face ID is fast, but it may not be that much faster than Touch ID in some cases.

When attempting to unlock his device, Ackerman showed off how the first-generation Touch ID on the iPhone 6 was basically on-par with the iPhone XS’ Face ID. Even more interesting, the need to swipe up for Face ID actually meant that getting into the iPhone XS was a hair slower.

It’s worth noting that his Face ID access speed would improve with Raise to Wake.

Still, even with the slight lag and design differences, the iPhone XS is a significantly faster device.

As you might expect, the iPhone XS opened all apps significantly faster — with one exception. The GeekBench app opened faster on the iPhone 6, but that’s largely attributable to the fact that it hasn’t been optimized for the XS yet.

When it came to multitasking, the iPhone XS also reigned in a triumphant win. Thanks to its bumped up memory specs, it was able to hold most apps in memory. On the other hand, the iPhone 6 needed to reopen the majority of the them.

The iPhone XS also performed much better when it came to navigating the internet. Web pages loaded faster and scrolling was just generally a lot smoother on the newer devices.

The iPhone 6 sports an Apple A8 series SoC with just 1 gigabyte of RAM.

The iPhone XS, on the other hand, packs Apple’s fastest chip yet: the A12 Bionic. It also has a hexa-core 64-bit processor and 4GB of RAM.

Still, when you look at the iPhone 6’s performance against the iPhone XS, the four-year-old device still performed admirably with its aging specifications. While there was a big difference in speed, the iPhone 6 was not unusable by any means — except for CPU-intensive apps like video editors and games.

The iPhone XS is currently the fastest smartphone in the world, but Ackerman’s video shows that older Apple devices — particularly with iOS 12 installed — don’t become obsolete as quickly as you might expect.