When it comes to performance, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are industry-leading. It’s common to see people claiming that the iPhone has “less specs” than the competition, but it’s simply not the case and hasn’t been for a few generations now. The A10 Fusion’s Hurricane CPU core is ahead of literally everything else when looking at single threaded performance, and to the extent that two of these CPU cores is enough to remain competitive in multithreaded performance against quad core CPUs used in other SoCs. GPU performance is almost on par with the A9X used in the iPad Pro 9.7 in some cases which is a testament to the systems development team at Apple considering that the system TDP of a 10” tablet is on the order of about 5 watts while a 5” smartphone is closer to 2-3 watts. The fast flash memory at this point is nothing new but still impressive and helps to make the phone feel fast.
What makes the performance of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus even more impressive is how that performance doesn’t compromise battery life. The iPhone 7 Plus manages to be competitive with devices that have batteries 25% larger while handily outperforming them. The iPhone 7 actually manages to pull ahead of the Android competition by a significant margin which is quite a feat considering how it’s one of the last smartphones on the market that is actually usable in one hand. Making a small phone that isn’t brick-like while maintaining class-leading battery life requires serious engineering effort in both man and material, and it’s impressive that Apple has been able to pull it off. The one major issue here is the charge time, which remains on the high side for both the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Apple should really be shipping a higher power charger considering how we’ve seen battery capacity go up by something like 50% since the 5W charger was introduced. If charge time matters to you, spring for an iPad charger.