OnePlus 5T narrowly beats iPhone X in speed

Apple has always been lauded for how it is able to squeeze out maximum performance from its hardware. And that has become even more evident when it started making its own A processors. Indeed, recent benchmarks have shown the Apple A11 processor to run circles around the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. But benchmarks are one thing, real-world performance is another. And in one rare instance, when pit against the newly launched OnePlus 5T, an Android phone might have had the last laugh.

It comparing apple to oranges, pardon the pun, because of the differences in hardware and operating systems. That, however, has never stopped people from passionately comparing Android phones and iPhones anyway. Since there are very few scientific ways to measure real-world performance, all that we can get is an approximation. But even then it's quite telling.

SuperSAF TV used a traditional method of starting apps one by one at the same time on the OnePlus 5T and the iPhone X, mostly to measure which one starts apps faster. For regular mobile apps, the two seem neck to neck but games start a lot faster on the iPhone X. The latter might be due to Apple's use of its own graphics library instead of the OpenGL standard.

While Everything Apple Pro does also make such a test, his first test involves opening apps in quick succession on each phone, to see which phone finishes the queue faster. The OnePlus 5T would have won, if not for the 4K video rendering, which the Snapdragon 835 doesn't seem to be well-designed for.

While the OnePlus 5T may have a small lead over the iPhone X in launching and running apps, it jumps by leaps and bounds when it comes to re-running apps. Memory management is still a bottleneck for the iPhone, which isn't surprising considering the iPhone X only has 3 GB of RAM. That said, it also boils down to how each operating system manages apps and memory, and iOS is, and has always been, notorious for being stingy.