Compare the speed of 6 iPhone models from iPhone 12 to iPhone 17

When Apple’s iPhone lines compete against each other in a test, the results show a clear improvement year after year!

Every year Apple introduces a new chip with amazing benchmark scores. But in reality, do those numbers really deliver the speed that users perceive? Famous technology YouTube channel PhoneBuff has just launched the biggest test ever: comparing the actual speed of 6 generations of iPhone Pro Max, from iPhone 12 to iPhone 17.

No more “touching the screen by hand to make it fair”, PhoneBuff uses a robot arm to operate automatically, ensuring every touch is absolutely accurate. Thanks to that, the results obtained are extremely objective and reveal many interesting things about Apple’s system optimization, temperature and RAM management capabilities over the years.

“Everything loses to iPhone 17”:

Daily tasks: Almost… equal

With familiar tests such as scanning a QR code, opening Facebook, Starbucks or downloading a 500-page Word file, the difference between generations is almost erased.

Result: iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 12 Pro Max finished only about… 1 second apart.
If you mainly use your phone for social networks, the office, and light tasks, you will hardly feel the speed difference when upgrading to a new device.

Camera: When processing power really shines

The difference only starts to become noticeable in tasks related to computational photography.

Portrait photography: Taking 10 continuous shots, iPhone 17 Pro Max only takes 14 seconds, up to 9 seconds faster than iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Panorama: This is the most “shocking” upgrade point. iPhone 17 Pro Max scans Panorama 4 times faster than iPhone 12 Pro Max, images are still sharp, without loss of quality.

If you like to take a lot of photos, especially in situations that require speed – the new iPhone is literally “press and shoot”.

Heavy tasks: The gap is getting bigger and bigger

When switching to photo/video editing or heavy gaming, the gap between models really becomes apparent.

Photomator (AI removes objects and eliminates noise): iPhone 17 finishes up to 40 seconds earlier than iPhone 12 Pro Max.

Export video with Premiere: The new device outperforms the old model in every case.

Gaming (Zombie Fire 3D): iPhone 17 loads about 3 seconds faster than iPhone 12.
In the test to decompress a 6GB file, the iPhone 14 Pro Max was unexpectedly the slowest, taking 47 seconds – suspected to be due to a software error, while the iPhone 15/16/17 only needed 15 seconds.

Temperature test – RAM: The biggest surprise lies here

PhoneBuff continues to let the machines run a series of long, heavy tasks continuously, called The Gauntlet test, to force the device to heat up and see how the machine handles resources.

The results surprised many people:

iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Pro Max slow down significantly when running continuously, possibly due to different heat dissipation titanium edges or incomplete optimization software, causing the device to experience thermal throttling (reducing performance to cool down).

Meanwhile, iPhone 13 and 14 Pro Max maintain good performance, even surpassing iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 in some video rendering tasks.

Who is the king of speed?

At the end of the test, the “speed” order is determined as follows:

1. iPhone 17 Pro Max: A real “monster”. It completed the test, cleaned up all tasks with ease and reached the finish line a full minute ahead of its competitors. The device is cool, does not reduce pulse and has perfect RAM management.

2. Middle group (iPhone 13, iPhone 14, iPhone 15, iPhone 16): There is a difference but not too big in the overall test because the temperature problem on the new models narrows the gap with the old models.

3. iPhone 12 Pro Max: Really showing signs of age, significantly slower in all heavy tasks.

Through the above test, it can be seen that if you are using iPhone 12, upgrading to the new models will bring a clearly different experience. However, if you own an iPhone 13 or iPhone 14 Pro Max, your actual performance is still very respectable and not too far behind compared to the iPhone 15 or iPhone 16.