How fast are the iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max models compared to one another? How fast are they compared to earlier iPhone models?

Please note that the iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max all have been discontinued. However, this Q&A is up-to-date and remains quite useful for anyone considering one of these models on the used market.

In the pair of corporate press releases that introduce the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 as well as the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, Apple repeatedly boasts that the devices are "powerful" and high performance.

Photo Credit: Apple, Inc. (iPhone 12)

In terms of details, though, Apple uses the exact same copy about the processor in both press releases:

Generations ahead of the competition, A14 Bionic is the first chip in the smartphone industry built on 5-nanometer process. Faster and more efficient than ever, A14 Bionic has the fastest CPU and GPU by up to 50 percent compared to the fastest competing smartphone chips, enabling console-quality gaming experiences, powerful computational photography, and more, while delivering great battery life. Pushing the limits of machine learning (ML), A14 Bionic features a 16-core Neural Engine -- for an 80 percent increase in performance -- that is capable of completing 11 trillion operations per second, enabling improved performance on even the most intense ML models.

With such emphasis on performance, it is a reasonable assumption that these mobiles are fast, but with the shared copy for both the entry-level iPhone 12 mini/iPhone 12 and more expensive iPhone 12 Pro/iPhone 12 Pro Max, it is a good clue that compared to one another, performance is similar.

However, third party benchmark analysis reveals that the more expensive "Pro" models do have 6 GB of RAM compared to only 4 GB of RAM for the "regular" iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12. Whether this RAM makes a difference in performance requires testing, though.

It also is worthwhile to compare the performance of the 2020 iPhone models -- the iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max -- to earlier models.

Benchmark Performance Overview

For a helpful general overview of the performance differences between the iPhone 12, iPhone 11, iPhone SE (2nd Gen), iPhone XS, iPhone XR, and even earlier iPhone models as well as the iPad and iPod touch, Everyi.com's own Ultimate iComparison makes it quick to compare side-by-side Geekbench benchmark averages for hundreds of possible performance comparisons.

Compared to one another, the Geekbench 5 benchmark demonstrates that the performance of the iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max essentially are identical, so the extra RAM in the "Pro" models does not make a notable difference in overall performance.

Compared to other recent iPhone models, the iPhone 12 (2020) models perform accordingly using the Geekbench 5 benchmark:

iPhone 12 Compared To:	Percent Faster (Single Core)	Percent Faster (Multicore)
iPhone 11/11 Pro/11 Pro Max	20%	22%
iPhone SE (2nd Gen)	20%	42%
iPhone XS	43%	46%
iPhone XR	43%	54%
iPhone X	73%	67%
iPhone 8	73%	77%
iPhone 7	114%	201%
iPhone 6s	193%	299%

With a review of the above, you clearly can see that the Geekbench 5 benchmark shows that the iPhone 12 is a relatively modest 20% or so faster than the iPhone 11 that was introduced the year before, but hugely faster than the iPhone XR first released two years earlier.

Performance gains for the iPhone 12 are even more substantial compared to earlier iPhone models, which can be of particular interest for those who only replace their iPhone after three or more years of use.

Real-World Performance Comparison

For how the iPhone 12 compares in day-to-day use to the iPhone 11 that preceded it, this video from YouTuber Nick Ackerman also is quite useful:

As you can see, hands-on usage commonly reflects the Geekbench benchmark results, but a 20% increase in benchmark results is not always as obvious in the real-world.

Performance Summary

Ultimately, the iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max are the same speed and about 20% faster than the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max that preceded them. In the real-world, though, this performance boost is not always noticeable.

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