iPhone 15 Pro benchmarks show A17 Pro’s power

Despite being as long as some feature-length films, Apple events are usually somewhat light on detail. 

Tuesday’s iPhone 15 launch was no exception, and while we know that the handsets will be the ‘bestest iPhones ever’ (only mildly paraphrasing here), we only have a vague impression as to why, with Apple largely keeping key specs close to its corporate chest.

But now a handset that appears to be the iPhone 15 Pro has popped up on Geekbench, a week ahead of it finding its way into early adopters’ mitts, giving us some useful insights. TL;DR: it’s very fast indeed.

As spotted by MySmartPrice, a handset with the name of “iPhone16,1” achieves a scores of 2,908 and 7,238 for single and multi-core respectively, while one called “iPhone16,2” gets a very similar 2,846 and 7,024. 

That’s presumably the Pro and Pro Max models, and the speed difference seems to be a rounding error. What is interesting is both come with 8GB RAM — up 2GB from the iPhone 14 Pro.

So what do these scores mean in the real world? They mean that the iPhone 15 Pro is set to comfortably be the fastest smartphone on the planet, at around 13-15% faster than last year’s version. Here’s a quick chart featuring key iPhones and the fastest Android handset’s average Geekbench scores for comparison:

There are a few things to say about this. The first is that Apple definitely gets a big hand up by making both hardware and software (though, of course, by that logic Google should be doing better). 

The second is in the real world, you’re unlikely to notice a difference, because all these handsets are more than fast enough, and capable of running pretty much anything you throw at them.

Finally, Apple’s hardware is brand new, while Qualcomm and Google’s are approaching their first birthdays. Both Google and Qualcomm have events lined up for October, so both could close the gap soon.

Though given both are some distance behind last year’s iPhone 14 Pro for speed, holding your breat