The new iPhone is as fast as a MacBook

Reviews are emerging for Apple’s new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, which go on sale Sept. 25 in 11 countries. One common thread: The new phones are fast. In fact, they’re apparently as fast—or faster—than Apple’s newly designed MacBook laptop, which launched earlier this year.

By Dan Frommer1 min readUpdated July 21, 2022

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Reviews are emerging for Apple $AAPL’s new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, which go on sale Sept. 25 in 11 countries. One common thread: The new phones are fast. In fact, they’re apparently as fast—or faster—than Apple’s newly designed MacBook laptop, which launched earlier this year.

Several testers have been running Geekbench, a tool designed to standardize speed tests across computer platforms, on the new iPhones’ Apple-designed A9 chips. Results suggest that the iPhone 6S performs about the same as the entry-level MacBook, and that the larger iPhone 6S Plus is even faster. a single-core score of 2,521 for the iPhone 6S Plus; the .

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These phones are objectively fast. (And, to be fair, the new MacBook—which uses a new, low-power “Core M” chip from Intel $INTC—is pretty slow.) It’s endlessly impressive how powerful these pocket computers are today.
Real-world usage, of course, is a different story. How fast software feels—and how much you can accomplish in a certain amount of time—depends on several factors, including processor speed, graphics chips, screen size, app complexity, network speed, your ability to concentrate and multitask, and others.
Apple is getting really good at designing fast, power-efficient chips. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a MacBook running a non-Intel chip at some point, if Apple wanted to.
The iPad Pro could be a Geekbench monster. Apple’s huge new tablet, which includes an even faster chip called the A9X, will launch later this year.