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This is the biggest and most intensive speed test we have ever done, where we're comparing the last six generations of iPhones from the 12 all the way up to the 17 and putting them through the same series of tasks by using robots in our lab. Now, we all know that every year the iPhone gets a new and more powerful chip, and while those improvements always look great on benchmark scores, how it actually translates into the real-world is less clear. So, to find out we're running a variety of tasks you actually do in real life from taking portraits with like movement and dynamic lighting to intense photo and video editing, where by the end of this video you'll know exactly how much speed you
gain with each new generation and whether or not an upgrade for speed actually makes sense. Let's get right into it. This episode is sponsored by Ugreen, who sent out their new NAS Sync DH2300, which basically gives you your own private cloud to back up your photos, videos, and files without needing to pay a monthly subscription. Setting this thing up is super simple. You just pop in a couple of hard drives with it supporting up to 60 TB, and then after a quick setup you're ready to start transferring files right away. With Ugreen's app it'll automatically back up your iPhone's photos, while also letting you access them remotely even when you're not at home, and using AI it'll even organize your photos by
people, objects, and locations just like the online cloud services do. Now, what makes this solution cool though is compared to the monthly cloud services all your files live right there on your own hardware, which not only gives you a better sense of privacy and control, but it comes with other perks like this HDMI port on the back, which lets you connect it straight to your TV and playback your media without needing an internet connection. And because it's on your local network, file transfers are just way faster. Like a 3 GB video file took only 34 seconds to upload on here versus over 3 minutes to iCloud despite us having gigabit speeds. And again, because this is your own hardware we're
talking about, there are no monthly fees, meaning once you get the NAS and the hard drives you need it basically starts paying for itself after a couple of years. And right now you can grab it for 20% off during Ugreen's Black Friday sale from November 20th through December 1st. So, make sure to hit that first link down below. All right, we'll kick things off with the portrait mode test, where we're going to be taking 10 shots as fast as we possibly can on each phone. This is something that I always do when taking photos of people, especially when I know they're going to want more than one photo anyway, and to help make it feel more like a real photo shoot we're doing five photos with our
model close-up and then five photos with our model moving back while also changing the lighting to help mix things up. Okay, we'll begin by starting the stopwatches and then launching into the camera, where because they all default to different focal lengths we switch over to 1x and then press that shutter button as fast as we can, where right away you can see the difference. The 17 Pro Max finishes taking all 10 photos first, completing the task in just 14 seconds with the 15 and 16 Pro coming in 3 seconds after it, the 13 and 14 take 7 seconds longer, while the 12 Pro Max finishes last taking an extra 9 seconds. So, a pretty big delta there, which I think in the real-world translates into
being able to take more photos with the newer iPhones in the same amount of time, thereby increasing the probability that you actually get a shot where like nobody is looking away or blinking. But next up we have the panorama test, where we actually had to go in and test the max pan speeds for each phone. Basically speeding up our robot by 10 mm a second over and over again until each phone gave us a message to slow down, which actually happens at wildly different speeds with the iPhone 17 Pro Max being able to take a panorama over four times faster than the 12 Pro Max, allowing it to complete the task in just 8 seconds with the 12 Pro Max taking a full 4 seconds longer, which is pretty crazy. I
actually stopped taking panoramas years ago just because it was so tedious to do. But now with how fast it is on these newer iPhones, I think I'm going to start taking them more often. It's insane how fast you can pan without actually losing any image quality. Okay, this next in-camera test is one that we've all done at this point, which is scanning a QR code, and this one kind of surprised me since there was virtually no difference between the phones. I mean, the website we loaded was a simple plain text menu, but all six phones finished the task in around 8 seconds, so not bad. In fact, this trend only continued in the other lightweight apps, where in Facebook all the phones
finished in under 5 seconds with the exception of the 12. In Starbucks opening the app and loading up the wallet took about the same time again, and I really wasn't expecting this one, but in Microsoft Word loading up a 500-page document the difference between the fastest phone in the iPhone 17 and the slowest in the 12 was only a second, so like nothing worth upgrading over. Now, I thought for sure we'd see a bigger delta in Excel since we are loading a 5,000-row sheet, but no. Again, very similar performance with only a 1-second delta at best. Now, it is worth noting that in between each of these tests we are giving the phones time to cool down, so like the thermals and the RAM management are not a factor
yet. We'll actually be doing that later in this video, but at least for now one by one in Subway Surfers and in Flip Diving there was very little difference between the iPhones. In Going Balls though, because the game is slightly more taxing, this time there is a difference even loading the graphics of the ball itself, where the iPhone 17 is able to beat every other phone by at least a second or two. Obviously, we're only launching the game, so this says nothing about like how smoothly the games actually run, but at least in Zombie Fire 3D, which has the most intensive graphics of the bunch, this time we see a more meaningful delta with the 17 Pro Max loading the game a step faster than the others with the 12
coming in 3 seconds later. But with iOS 26 one task I was super curious about was how fast each phone can create those spatial photos, where we did the effect on the same photo on every phone, and they were nearly identical. So, I'm actually pretty impressed with how well the older phones are holding up. Of course, we also haven't really been pushing the phones too hard. So, in this next test in Photomator we have each phone doing a more intensive object removal, where you can definitely see how much faster the newer phones are. We're also running a denoising filter to get rid of the photo's graininess, where this task is a lot more intensive, and you know, as a result we are seeing a
bigger difference with the iPhone 17 just ripping through it way faster than even the iPhone 16, which, you know, is only a step ahead of the 13, 14, and 15 with the 12 just clearly behind the pack finishing the task a whopping 40 seconds later. In Adobe Premiere we're doing two separate tasks here. The first one is removing the background from a 1-minute video, where the phones have to separate the subject from the rest of the frame, where wow, the iPhone 17 just blows through it once again, already working on the second task, which is exporting the video itself. The iPhone 15 surprisingly is doing better than the 16 here though with the 16 only barely beating the 13, which somehow did better
than the 14. So, like the only obvious result here was the 12 falling behind by a pretty big margin, and then the 17 being the fastest. So, like definitely not the type of results I was expecting, at least from the 13 through the 16. All right, so the final task we have lined up before we go to the thermal and RAM management test is unzipping a 6 GB file made up of NASA documents, photos, and videos, where wow, the 15 and 16 and 17 all finished the task in just 15 seconds. The iPhone 12 Pro Max somehow comes in fourth place, which is definitely unexpected, with the 13 taking another 15 seconds to come in fifth, and the 14 Pro Max just did the worst here finishing in 47 seconds. And before you ask, yes, we ran multiple
trials, and this result was consistent. So, I don't know if it's a software bug or what, but it's the result that we got. All right, it is time for the gauntlet, where we're going to be running all the tasks again, but this time with no breaks and no time for the phones to cool down in between. Now, doing it like this not only allows us to see the small differences add up over a wider range of apps, but it also helps push the thermal performance and RAM management on each phone a lot harder. And as you'd expect in the first few apps we see pretty much exactly what we did earlier, which doesn't really come as a surprise since the phones haven't even done enough to get warm yet, but
there is a twist this time. We're all six phones have to record the same exact 1-minute 4K video before moving on to the next set of tasks, which is pretty taxing on a phone if you think about it. Not only does a phone have to process all that pixel data, but it also has to keep the subject in focus, it has to record audio, while also writing the video file itself to memory. All of which should raise the temps on the phones by a good bit. But at least so far in this second row of apps it doesn't seem to be doing too much to at least the newer iPhones, with them running through Facebook, Starbucks, Word, and Excel at about the same rate as before. Of course, things could
change once all the phones make it to the gaming row, where at this point I imagine that the temps on each phone are going to be running a lot higher. And interestingly, we are now seeing some differences, at least for the older iPhones, where the gap between them and the 17 Pro Max is bigger than what it was when we tested the games individually. Like in Going Balls for example, the delta between the 17 and the 12 has now doubled from 2 seconds to 4 seconds. Obviously, that's not a huge difference, but it is interesting to see how the performance changes when we stack everything in a row like this. But the thing I'm really curious about is how the phones are going to handle
Photomator since this task is intensive to begin with even on its own, but on top of everything else we've done so far I imagine that we're going to see some thermal throttling, which is when a phone slows itself down to prevent overheating. But at least on the iPhone 17 Pro Max that's not the case. I mean, the phone is just flying through it barely slower than it was when we tested it individually. However, the same can't be said about the iPhone 15 Pro Max and 16 Pro Max, where for whatever reason these phones are going significantly slower than before, which I don't know if it has to do with the fact that they're the only ones using titanium for their body instead of aluminum or stainless steel, or if it's just an
early Apple intelligence thing. But either way, they're going so slow that both the iPhone 14 Pro Max and even the iPhone 13 Pro Max not only catch up to them, but pass them as they move on to Premiere. Now, while it's entirely possible that this is just a software bug, we also have to consider the fact that this didn't happen earlier when we tested the app individually at lower temperatures. Plus the fact that the app is made by Apple themselves, or at least a company that Apple owns. So, like I don't want to make any excuses. Of course, the 15 and 16 can still make a comeback here in Premiere, since it's possible that the older iPhones will eventually throttle themselves, or that
the newer chips in the 15 and 16 are better equipped for this video task. But for now, I want to point out that the 17 Pro Max is already done with the first lap. Not only did it finish with Premiere, but it also unzipped that 6GB file in files, with it well on its way to finishing the second lap. Where with 12GB of RAM, I don't anticipate it not being able to keep everything open and ready to go. Meanwhile, the 13 and 14 Pro Max were able to maintain their lead over the newer models through Premiere, but it looks like they lose a step during the unzip task in files, where both the 15 and the 16 Pro Max do it significantly faster, allowing them to make the comeback just in time to finish
the first lap ahead, clocking in a time of 5 minutes and 24 seconds equally for both. Which for some context, is still over a full minute longer than the 17 Pro Max, and only 13 seconds faster than both the 13 and the 14 Pro Max. But something interesting happens in this second lap. Despite having more RAM, the 16 Pro Max absolutely struggles to keep everything open. I don't know if that was a thermal management thing, where iOS was closing stuff in the background to help the phone cool down, or if the 16 just used more RAM for some of those tasks at the end. But either way, it was enough to let the 13 and 14 Pro Max pretty much catch up once again, with the 13 through the 16 all finishing the
entire test with very similar times. With the big delta, of course, being the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which just struggled all the way through. And the 17 Pro Max, which just made it all look easy. So, a very interesting result. I would personally take a balance of both the individual tests, plus the gauntlet that we did. But you know, either way, that is it for me in this video. This was a heck of a lot of work. It took us weeks and weeks to put this together. So, thank you for watching. I hope you guys liked it. And as always, I'll see you in the very next episode.
