Apple finally unveiled the 2016 iPhone 7 and Apple iPhone 7 Plus – two phones that have been in the rumor mills for several months now.
To almost no one’s surprise, the smartphones came out just as the rumors had been saying, but there is still one feature that will surprise many.
According to Apple, the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are actually a pair. What this means is that the two share basically everything, including the design language, performance, software and even the main camera, even though the larger iPhone 7 Plus has a second lens on the back. However, it appears that Apple’s claims are not true, especially when it comes to performance of the two handsets.
Benchmarking website GeekBench has discovered that the iPhone 7 has a different performance level as compared to the larger iPhone 7 Plus. Apparently, Apple packed different amounts of RAM in the two phones, something that means the larger model delivers much better performance as compared to the standard model. In the tests, the iPhone 7 Plus was discovered to pack 3GB of RAM as opposed to the 2GB RAM found on the standard iPhone.
This was speculate days before the phones were launched, with renowned KGI Securities analyst claiming that Apple would go for a superior RAM capacity on the Plus variant. Given that Apple did not go into details of the amount of RAM during the keynote, it was hard to tell if this had indeed materialized. In fact, Apple presentation that kept on referring to the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus as a “pair” meant that they share the same capabilities across the board.
Looking at it from another angle, it is possible Apple took this direction so as to avoid presenting the iPhone 7 as a weaker version of the iPhone 7 Plus, especially since it comes without support for dual-lens camera. But what does this mean for those who have already pre-ordered an iPhone 7?
For starters, you should know that there could possibly be very insignificant differences in performance levels of the two. This is true because despite Apple presenting the two phones as equivalent, the smaller iPhone 7 also comes with a lower resolution of 750p as compared to the 1080p on the larger model. Given that the Plus model has to deal with almost twice the number of pixels on the smaller variant and the fact that it also deals with processing a dual-lens camera as opposed to the single lens on the standard variant, it is possible that the performance levels of the two could still be the same.