AnandTech Reviews the iPhone 7

I've pulled out some quotes that I think are particularly relevant to how far ahead Apple really is (bolded for emphasis).

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While it might seem reasonable to attribute the superior web performance of iOS devices to Apple's focus on improving single threaded CPU performance, the fact that Android devices with Cortex A72 CPUs are only matching Apple's A8 SoC shows that the gap is not only due to the CPU power available. Chrome's generally poor performance on Android is a significant limiting factor, and you can see in the chart how the improvement in Android device CPU performance over time has not translated into anything close to the sorts of gains that Apple has seen in the same period. While there are customized versions of Chromium like Snapdragon Browser that provide optimizations for a class of SoCs, it doesn't look like the gap between Android devices running Chrome and iOS devices running Mobile Safari is going to close any time soon, and if anything, it's only widening with each year.

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Looking at our WiFi web browsing test, it’s genuinely ridiculous how well the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus perform in this test. The iPhone 7 Plus is definitely down on battery life compared to the Galaxy S7 Edge, but it’s within 5% despite using a battery that’s almost 20% smaller. The iPhone 7 is actually comparable in battery life to the iPhone 7 Plus, and is significantly above the Galaxy S7 with Exynos 8890. Of course, the iPhone 7 has a significantly lower resolution display and a smaller battery, but the nature of smartphone design is that larger devices will generally have better battery life because the board area needed remains mostly constant while the amount of area for battery increases. The iPhone 7 has significantly improved in battery life here, likely due to a combination of A10 Fusion's power optimizations – particularly the small CPU cores – and the removal of the headphone jack, which teardown photos show to have been partially replaced with the battery. However if you do the math efficiency sees a relatively minor uplift.

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Overall, I think that if there’s any phone that is worth 650-750 USD at its base, it’s the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. If you’re upgrading from the iPhone 6s Plus you probably won’t find a ton of differences, but it’s still a significant step up in display, camera, speaker quality, battery life, and system performance. There are some software bugs and minor performance issues, but there’s nothing that really stands out as a showstopper and these issues are due to be fixed within the coming weeks. The iPhone might not excite like smartphones once did, but the amount of attention to detail and execution in the hardware is unparalleled and a cut above anything else in the industry.

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Plenty more in the article, worth a read. Really looking forward to their deep dive into the A10 Fusion.

Pretty amazing how far it's come. The A10 really validates the big.LITTLE design concept, overall a very impressive SoC.

As for single core performance, Apple and NVIDIA are the only companies with a true "big core", although NVIDIA's designs are now used for their massive push into the automotive industry and recent Denver cores are MIA from Android phones or tablets.

Still, the thermal limitations of the SoC are very apparent, given the A10 throttles to 60% of it's starting performance in the first 10 minutes at load:

Apple also seems to have an issue with scaling that single core performance to multi core, probably also a result of thermal limitations. Hence, one core can clock up to get high single core results, but that clock could not be sustained if both cores tried to do so.

Although MediaTek's SoC designs are improving considerably each year, they're still not ready to take Qualcomm head on. This is probably why Google is planning to make their own in-house silicon designs for future Pixel devices and possibly move away from relying on Qualcomm. The only modern SoC Android OEM's can use is the Snapdragon 821, which is a slightly overclocked Snapdragon 820, an SoC from the start of 2016. Of course, the Snapdragon 830 is likely to make its appearance in a few months and will likely outperform the A10 in a number of fields (not likely single core though, as that's just not a direction Qualcomm is looking to go).

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I should also note, that a lot of the bits you decided to bold are incomplete statements without the non-bold sections and in some cases do NOT relay the intended message.

For example:

Yours:

While it might seem reasonable to attribute the superior web performance of iOS devices to Apple's focus on improving single threaded CPU performance, the fact that Android devices with Cortex A72 CPUs are only matching Apple's A8 SoC shows that the gap is not only due to the CPU power available. Chrome's generally poor performance on Android is a significant limiting factor, and you can see in the chart how the improvement in Android device CPU performance over time has not translated into anything close to the sorts of gains that Apple has seen in the same period.

The part you missed:

While it might seem reasonable to attribute the superior web performance of iOS devices to Apple's focus on improving single threaded CPU performance, the fact that Android devices with Cortex A72 CPUs are only matching Apple's A8 SoC shows that the gap is not only due to the CPU power available. Chrome's generally poor performance on Android is a significant limiting factor, and you can see in the chart how the improvement in Android device CPU performance over time has not translated into anything close to the sorts of gains that Apple has seen in the same period.

That's why I included the whole quote, so you could see that for yourself. Which you did. The emphasis shined a spotlight on how far ahead Apple is in the mobile world (or how far behind everyone else is).

Google trying hardware is nothing new, they failed to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars not too long ago. Hardware is hard, and their current offerings are missing anything unique to set apart Pixel phones from the crowd. It's just a Nexus made by HTC that they decided to call 'Pixel' instead. But it costs just as much, it's almost certainly DOA.

The iPhone 7 is an evolution of a hardware and software platform that Apple has been so keenly invested in that they control the most important parts of both the hardware and of course all the software. Google is really, really late to that party, and a few billion dollars down already.

I don't know if it's that iphone is a head. It's more like the snapdragon processors aren't meant to work with a multitude of OS variants. Add to that android is harder to fix because of that or in some cases highly unlikely to be fixed since you're at the whimsy of carriers and OEMs

Your emphases are out of context for those trying to find the takeaway. It completely defeats the purpose of trying to highlight parts of the quote if it gives the wrong message, which is exactly what you did.

The Pixel was designed in-house. Google has never made hardware to the extent of designing an SoC and making the smartphone themselves. HTC making the Pixel is the same as Foxconn making the iPhone. As for the price of the Pixel, it's definitely too high, but it's not an ordinary smartphone. One feature often ignored is the fact this is the first Daydream smartphone, meaning it meets hardware requirements for the display, motion sensors and SoC to offer a VR experience with Daydream View. As for Android's UI and application performance on the device, we'll have to wait for a review. Early feedback on the device is based on synthetic benchmarks from Pixel or other Android devices with the same SoC, but Google has made optimizations to Android for this device, something not seen on previous Android phones. Once again, I wouldn't expect anything outstanding, the Pixel is just using an overclocked version of an SoC that was sampling at in Q4 2015. Meanwhile, the Snapdragon 830 is just starting to sample now.

I want an iphone 6s with android OS APPLE APPLE LISTEN TO ME

@Celsius765: so you just gave us reasons why iOS is better than Android.

@mister-man: I suppose. But I still think android could be good sans the splintering. What do think of rather than skins OEM exclusive features and functions can be offered as widgets, apps, or extensions. Although OS extensions don't sound like they're possible like browser extensions are. I'm not entirely sure that's what's conflicting with Android but that might be it.

IOS is great it's apple thats not, atleast that's what I hear. They're the most expensive, and seem to go way out of their way to keep it that way. I realized this when I go to their website, I really want one of their phones but I may have to settle for last year's model if I wanna keep the cost down and not settle for a low capacity phone. But even then evrything I needed amounted $910. Ugh I just looked up repair cost if you're out of warranty. No repair for a phone should be over $100 or $150 at max. A heavy duty case is a must