After the iPhone 6s launched last month, we saw some benchmarks showing that the device was as powerful as the 2015 Retina MacBook. Linus Sebastian of LinusTechTips, however, theorized that these benchmark results don’t just reflect well on the iPhone 6s — they also reflect rather poorly on the 2015 MacBook.
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Why would this be the case? Essentially, Sebastian earlier this year using water cooling procedures to determine that the 2015 MacBook is highly prone to “drastically” throttling when it gets hot, which was a main reason why it performed poorly on GeekBench scores. This also suggests that the 2015 MacBook is actually more powerful than many tests show, but its power is held back by thermal throttling.
Linus wanted to see if the iPhone 6s similarly had extra power under the hood that was hindered by heat-related issues. However, he quickly discovered that Apple’s newest phone showed almost no signs of thermal throttling when he subjected it to a similar water cooling test.
“The iPhone 6s, when running CPU-intensive benchmarks, anyway, doesn’t thermal throttle at all,” he explained, although he noted that it “does throttle if you load up the GPU.”
To see if this was common with other devices, he put the iPhone 6s, Galaxy S6 edge, the LG G4 and the HTC One M9 through similar tests. He found that the G4 maintained its performance even as its temperature increased, while the Galaxy S6 edge dropped slightly and the One M9 dropped by a lot. Given the high-profile issues HTC has had with the Snapdragon 810 processor, however, this isn’t too surprising.
So what’s the bottom line here? Well, the iPhone 6s is a very powerful phone but it’s not actually as powerful as the 2015 MacBook, no matter what benchmarks may show.
Check out the full video below.
