Google’s new Pixel smartphone has plenty going for it right now. Heading into the holiday season, the Pixel and Pixel XL are the hottest new flagship Android phones in the world. They have some competition at the top, but not much thanks to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 fiasco; after a hot launch that saw Samsung ship approximately 2.5 million smartphones to markets around the world, Samsung was forced to cancel every single Note 7 it sold and discontinue the phone due to a problem with spontaneous explosions. When you’re dealing with smartphones that are held in people’s hands, in their pockets and against their faces, “spontaneous explosions” is not a good problem to have.
Both new Pixel phones offer solid specs and a sleek (albeit familiar) design to smartphone shoppers this holiday season, but Android fans looking to crown a new performance king were unable to do so with Google’s Pixel lineup. Now, yet another performance test has found that Apple’s iPhone 7 doesn’t just outperform Google’s Pixel, the new iPhone absolutely pummels it.
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We’ve covered a number of different performance tests that pit the latest and greatest smartphones from Google against Apple’s iPhone 7 lineup, and a familiar picture is beginning to take shape. Apple’s iPhone lineup has never been particularly impressive when it comes to specs on paper, but efficiency and optimization are Apple’s forte. As a result, its hardware and software always manages to outperform rivals, and it’s the same old story with the iPhone 7.
As far as raw benchmark scores go, Google’s Pixel didn’t fare very well against Apple’s iPhone lineup. The Pixel achieved a score of 1565 on Geekbench’s single-core test while Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus more than doubled that with 3488. On Geekbench’s multi-core test, the Pixel got a 4103 while the iPhone scored 5590.
Moving on to real-world performance, the test we had been waiting for was finally released on Wednesday. Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus and Google’s Pixel XL were lined up in a familiar speed test that involves opening and closing a series of apps one at a time, and then repeating them in the same order for a second “lap.” Again, the results weren’t even close and Apple’s iPhone clobbered Google’s new flagship phablet.
Now, the results of yet another type of performance test once again show a huge disparity.
The Google Pixel phone is "only" 3x slower in Google Octane benchmark vs iPhone 7, 26582 vs. 9428
— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) October 27, 2016
Google’s Octane 2.0 is a benchmark test that specifically measures a computer or smartphone’s JavaScript performance. JavaScript, of course, is a very popular programming language that is widely used across the web and in web apps. These Octane 2.0 benchmark scores illustrate once again just how powerful Apple’s A10 Fusion chipset is, and how efficient iOS and the Safari browser are.
