Iphone 7 Review

Every year, Apple releases the best iPhone ever, but the iPhone 7 feels different somehow. All of its major details leaked ahead of time, not to mention a good handful of rumors about next fall’s iPhone, which could be a major redesign with an OLED screen and no Home button. For now, the iPhone 7 makes minor changes to the phone’s form and bigger improvements to its function. But it adds a couple new annoyances at the same time, which makes the iPhone 7 feel a bit like a beta version of what’s to come.

    A10 Fusion

The biggest advancement is under the hood. At the September event, Apple explained that the A10 Fusion chip powering the iPhone 7 has four cores: two high-performance cores for the most intense tasks, and two low-energy cores to handle easier jobs while saving power. All I noticed when testing the iPhone 7—we bought a 128GB rose gold model on launch day—was speed.
Apps launch quickly, updates install quickly, and the camera is ready to shoot seemingly the very instant I swipe to it from the lock screen. I didn’t notice any different in performance in a resource-hungry app like Pixelmator as in a lighter app like Mail. Everything is just faster. Geekbench scores are 3440 for the single-core CPU test, and 5273 for the multi-core. That’s nuts—my iPhone 6s scored 1437 and 2411, respectively, on the same tests, while my 2013 MacBook Air (1.7GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB of RAM) scored 2935 and 6200. 
 

While Apple did remove the analog headphone port (and trust me, I’ll get way into that a little later), it did add a second speaker for stereo sound when you hold the phone in landscape mode. The extra speaker is up near the FaceTime camera, and I could hear a bit of stereo separation when streaming The Force Awakens in the Videos app. Watching the same passage on an iPhone 6s, it was more obvious the sound was only coming from one speaker, and the iPhone 7 was louder too.
Another nice addition is the doubling of storage sizes. The entry-level iPhone 7 is now 32GB instead of 16GB. The middle tier is 128GB, and the high-end 256GB. That’s a pretty big deal if you’re always having to manage your available storage by deleting photos and videos. The iPhone SE tops out at 64GB, and the iPhone 6s at 128GB, so if you need a huge amount of storage, the iPhone 7 is the way to go.

  Camera

This review only covers the iPhone 7—we’ll follow up with a separate review of the iPhone 7 Plus, which has two cameras. The iPhone 7 has one 12-megapixel iSight camera, but its performance is much improved over the iPhone 6s. It’s got a wider aperture lens, f1.8, which lets in more light for better photos in low-light conditions than the iPhone 6s’s f2.2 lens. The iPhone 7 also has optical image stabilization, which used to be confined to the larger Plus models. The TrueTone flash is also 50 percent brighter thanks to four LEDs, and Apple says it can even compensate for the subtle flickering of indoor lighting.