The iPhone 7 represents another upgrade over the iPhone 6S: there’s a new, faster f/1.8 lens, the addition of optical image stabilization, a new four-color True Tone flash, and wider color capture. This all adds up to a decent improvement, but the iPhone 6S was already operating at the top of the scale, bested only recently by the latest cameras in the Galaxy S7 and Note 7. In low light, that faster lens and optical image stabilization means that the 7 significantly outperforms the 6S. But compared to the iPhone 6S, the iPhone 7 is a step improvement, not a major leap.he iPhone 7 has the new A10 Fusion chip, another product from Apple’s industry-leading chip design team. It’s a new design with four cores: two high performance cores, and two low-power cores that use less battery power during everyday tasks.
It’s lightning-fast, of course, with early benchmarks indicating that the A10 Fusion is faster than even the A9X in the iPad Pro. But In my super boring day-to-day Twitter / Facebook / Gmail / Slack / Safari usage, the iPhone 7 Plus wasn’t really all that much faster than the A9 chip in the iPhone 6S Plus — likely because I wasn’t pushing the processor enough to use the high-performance cores. It’s impressive that Apple was able to create a more efficient processor that delivers the same perceived performance as the previous generation while using less power, but that also means that in everyday use I didn’t see anything like the performance leaps that were so noticeable in previous iPhone updates.
Still, faster is better, and once app developers start targeting the A10 Fusion, we might see a new wave of apps that harness its raw power. But that’s a familiar waiting game we’ve been playing with ever-faster iOS devices for years now.