How the taste of irony must taste sweet for iPhone fans this morning. The iPhone 6s Plus has been named by benchmark software AnTuTu as the best performing smartphone it tested throughout 2015, beating all of its Android competitors by a fairly huge margin.
Of course, many reading these pages will know that a criticism often levelled at Apple’s smartphones by Android fans is that the iPhone cannot compete with Android flagships in terms of raw performance. A comparison of specs between an Android flagship and the iPhone 6s Plus is usually used to try to embarrass owners of the iPhone.
It is an easy bat to hit with as on paper the 6s Plus does seem weedy. Apple A9, a chipset that integrates a 1.84GHz dual-core Twister CPU and a PowerVR GT7600 GPU, paired with 2GB of RAM. Huawei’s Mate 8, the second best device of last year boasts blistering specs that read as 4GB of RAM and a Kirin 950 SoC with four Cortex A72 CPU cores clocked at 2.3GHz, four Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at 1.8GHz, and a Mali Mali-T880 MP4 GPU.
Both also sport 1080p screens so the drain in that respect is the same, so how then does the apparently under-spec’d iPhone 6s Plus get a AnTuTu score of 132,620 while the Mate 8 92,746? It’s simple, specs are not everything and the overall package and software are! As for the rest of the list, it is largely made up of devices powered by Samsung’s admittedly good Exynos 7420.
So Apple fans, when your Android rival says that the specs of the iPhone 6s Plus are poor, this should give them plenty of food for thought.