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Speed test: How much faster is iPhone 12 compared to the original iPhone? [Video]

iPhone has become an incredibly powerful device over the last fourteen years and the early days of the smartphone’s experience can feel like ancient history. Now a new speed test looks to quantify how much faster the iPhone 12 is compared to the original iPhone.

While an iPhone 12 vs original iPhone speed test might sound silly, Apple actually uses comparisons to its first-gen devices regularly. The most recent was the new iPad Pro announcement where Apple said on stage the new M1 chip offers 75x faster CPU performance and 1,500x graphics performance compared to the original iPad. That’s not a useful comparison to really anyone… but it sure does sound impressive 😅.

But that context does make this iPhone 12 vs original iPhone speed test from PhoneBuff more interesting.

The iPhone 12 lineup features Apple’s impressive A14 Bionic chip with a 6-core CPU with 3.1GHz speeds. That compares to the 2007 original iPhone’s 1-core CPU with just 412 MHz clock speed. We’re also talking 4GB RAM vs 128MB, and 320 x 480 vs 2532 x 1170 resolution displays.

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As noted by PhoneBuff, the tricky part about trying to run a speed test between iPhones 14 years apart is that the original can’t run the high-performance apps that would normally be part of the process. So it had to be basic iOS apps like camera, photos, calculator, notes, Safari, and the App Store.

So this type of speed test isn’t able to truly measure how much faster or more capable the iPhone 12 is but the results showed the latest flagship completing the tasks in 1 minute with the original iPhone taking 2 minutes and 29 seconds.

PhoneBuff also noted that they even had to delay their robot to match up with how slow the original iPhone was. Check out the full video:

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