This Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra vs. iPhone 11 Pro Max Speed Test Might Surprise You

Galaxy S20 Ultra vs iPhone 11 Pro Max Speed Test Credit: EverythingApplePro
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When a new flagship smartphone comes out, you know that someone is going to pit it against the last “best” device available in a speed test. And this week, EverythingApplePro pitted the new Galaxy S20 Ultra against the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

The results of the test are both surprising and unsurprising in different ways, especially when you take a look at the specifications for both devices. Here’s what you should know about the speed test — and the devices themselves.

iPhone 11 Pro Max vs Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra

The iPhone 11 Pro Max sports an Apple-designed A13 Bionic CPU created with a 7nm architecture. It packs 4GB of DDR4X RAM.

On the other hand, the Galaxy S20 Ultra packs Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 865, also created with a 7nm+ process. Impressively, it packs newer and more memory with 12GB of DDR5 RAM.

How you look at these specifications really depends on how familiar you are with the differences between iPhones and Androids.

Apple has historically made the fastest smartphones on the market, even with much less RAM. That’s mostly because of the tight integration between hardware and software over in Cupertino and the fact that the iOS ecosystem is really a one-company type of situation.

Samsung’s devices, on the other hand, really represent the best-in-class among Android flagships. But while they look much more impressive on paper, the latest Galaxy flagships will usually be slightly slower than or about the same as the latest iPhone.

So how does the Galaxy S20 Ultra stack up versus the iPhone 11 Pro Max? Let’s get into the testing.

The Results

EverythingApplePro’s testing is pretty standard. It consists of two rounds. Round one involves opening a slew of apps, while round two involves reopening those apps to see if they remained open in the background. In between the two rounds is a CPU-intensive task — in this case, exporting 4K video.

The iPhone 11 Pro Max completed the first round more quickly than the Galaxy S20 Ultra with a final time of 3 minutes and 6 seconds. iPhones consistently do better when exporting high-resolution videos.

The Galaxy S20 Ultra finished about 13 seconds later with a final time of 3 minutes, 19 seconds.

However, Samsung’s S20 handily beat the iPhone 11 Pro Max in the second round. The Samsung device was able to reopen every app in about half the time (1:05 versus 2:04).

Largely, that all comes down to memory. And while Apple devices have historically done a lot more with less, there’s just no way to compete against a device with eight more gigabytes of RAM.

Of course, the iPhone 11 Pro Max is also last year’s Apple flagship, and it’s almost guaranteed that this year’s Cupertino-designed smartphone will be even faster.

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