Impressively, it’s been 1,244 days since an Android smartphone has beaten a flagship iPhone in the first round of a PhoneBuff speed test. But that’s now changed because of the new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. However, the iPhone 14 Pro Max was able to make a comeback against the S23 in the second round. Here’s what happened.
The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra comes with some big hardware improvements like a custom Snapdragon 8 gen 2 chip, 12 GB RAM, and UFS 4.0 storage. The latter is rated for speeds up to 4,200 MB/s. That’s a notable advantage compared to the iPhone 14 Pro Max’s 6 GB RAM and slower NVME storage.
Setting out to see if Apple’s dialed-in hardware and software integration could overcome the latest Android flagship from Samsung, PhoneBuff did his signature two-round speed test with the smartphones.
As he notes, both of these phones are very fast, so this test is really more about “bragging rights” than anything else. Breaking a long winning streak for iPhone, the S23 Ultra was able to complete the first round just 1 second faster than the iPhone.
But then in the second round, the iPhone 14 Pro Max outperformed the S23, bringing the final times to 2:41.53 and 2:41.78, respectively.
In the end, even though the iPhone technically won by about two-tenths of a second, PhoneBuff considered it a tie when you consider the margin of error.
Check out how it all went down:
Top image via PhoneBuff
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