iPhone 7: Its Speed and Camera Are Crazy-good, but It Still Drives Me Crazy

Every year, Apple releases the best iPhone ever, but the iPhone 7 feels different somehow. All of its major details leaked ahead of time, not to mention a good handful of rumors about next fall’s iPhone, which could be a major redesign with an OLED screen and no Home button.

- Susie Ochs

For now, the iPhone 7 makes minor changes to the phone’s form and bigger improvements to its function. But it adds a couple new annoyances at the same time, which makes the iPhone 7 feel a bit like a beta version of what’s to come.

A10 FUSION

The biggest advancement is under the hood. At the September event, Apple explained that the A10 Fusion chip powering the iPhone 7 has four cores: two high-performance cores for the most intense tasks, and two low-energy cores to handle easier jobs while saving power. All I noticed when testing the iPhone 7—we bought a 128GB rose gold model on launch day—was speed.

Apps launch quickly, updates install quickly, and the camera is ready to shoot seemingly the very instant I swipe to it from the lock screen. I didn’t notice any difference in performance in a resource-hungry app like Pixelmator as in a lighter app like Mail. Everything is just faster. Geekbench scores are 3,440 for the single-core CPU test, and 5,273 for the multi-core. That’s nuts—my iPhone 6s scored 1,437 and 2,411, respectively, on the same tests, while my 2013 MacBook Air (1.7GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB of RAM) scored 2,935 and 6,200.

However, despite the A10’s power management features, I didn’t notice dramatic battery life savings. My iPhone 7 still gives me warnings in the early evening (usually between 5pm and 8pm) that I’m down to 20 percent power, and even if I go into Low Power Mode at that point, I usually need to top off a little bit to make it to bedtime. I’m a pretty heavy user, so your mileage may vary, but I doubt your charging habits will change much.

BIGGER IS BETTER.