AnandTech’s iPhone 7 Review ⇥ anandtech.com

Joshua Ho and Brandon Chester subjected the iPhones 7 to the rigorous battery of tests unique to AnandTech, and it’s a screamer: insane performance jumps over the already-fast iPhones 6S met with big leaps in battery life. Yet:

As Apple has rapidly added new features, UI performance has taken a hit, and the nature of the performance problems is such that throwing more hardware at them won’t make them go away because they’re often due to circumstances where rendering is blocked or is being done in a manner such that even large improvements in performance would not bring things back to 60fps. While I’m not going to comb through the entire OS to find all the cases where this happens, it happens enough that it’s something I would describe as a significant pain point in my experience as a user.

It’s nowhere near as egregious as the performance hiccups on Android phones, but iOS is increasingly adding instances where animations aren’t as smooth as they should be. Activating Notification Centre, scrolling through widgets in the Today view, and pulling down to show Spotlight are all instances where it’s reliably easy to cause a suboptimal animation.