Wesley's Tool-Box

Smartphone software and hardware become more sophisticated by the year. So a new device is expected to be faster than its predecessor. But it's a balancing act of both raw performance and power consumption. The A10 Fusion chip in the iPhone 7 series has four cores - two high-performance cores and two power-efficient cores to do just that. It's supposed to be the fastest A-series chip yet while not impacting battery life. So how does it really do on performance? Apple claims up to 2 times faster for CPU and 3 times faster for GPU compared to 2 generations ago (iPhone 6 series). Let's see if that's true.


GeekBench 4 Result Details: 4S | 5 | 5S | 6+ | 6S+ | 7

GeekBench has been a standared in benchmarking CPU performance across many platforms. The 4.0.1 version that came out recently runs on iOS 9 or later, so I can only compare up to iPhone 4S. Still, you can see that iPhone 7 does indeed perform well. It is about 2.1 to 2.2 times faster than iPhone 6 Plus, and 35 to 40 percent faster than iPhone 6S Plus. We no longer have 2x performance jump like back in iPhone 5 - 5S transition, but things are in line with Apple's claim here.

Given that iPhone's predecessor is iPod the digital music player, the listening experience is still a big part of the device for many people. So the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack was bound to be controversial, despite the fact that Apple has provided many options to mitigate the inconvenience.


Primarily, the EarPod earphones bundled with iPhone 7 use Lightning connector, giving you at least one native solution. Along with that is a Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter that you can use with any other regular earphones and headphones. Because Lightning port is fully digital, the both the adapter and the earphones have DAC modules inside to provide analog audio output. Unless you must charge the phone at the same time, you're not worse off than before as long as the adapter works as intended.

On a side note, providing both a DAC-equipped earphone and an adapter resulted in sacrificing the plastic case for the earphones, likely because of costs. The case is now simply a throwaway paper packaging.

My iPhone collection is constantly growing. When you lay them down like this with their boxes, it provides me with a nice view of how the technology is evolving. As with all things, though, old devices simply ceases to be supported by the manufacturer. The three iPhones at the top no longer receive any major iOS version updates and are stuck in their time. The new member of this is the iPhone 4S, topping out at iOS 9.3.5. I expect iPhone 5 to join this group next year because, along with iPhone 5C, it is the last in the line of 32-bit iPhones and iOS 10 visually warns about an app that's not 64-bit.

iOS updates or not, all my devices are kept in good working condition. So I brought them out for another annual round of tests. For this year's tests, devices from iPhone 5 to 7 had iOS 10.0.1. 4S, 4, and 3GS had 9.3.5, 7.1.2, and 6.1.6, respectively. Last year, devices from iPhone 4S to 6S Plus had 9.1. Let's take a look at the boot times.


Unless it's an old device that's feeling the weight of a new OS, newer devices tend to have a quicker boot time. Strangely though, iPhone 7 does not boot up as fast as its predecessor, and this was repeatedly observed. Perhaps this is due to the tested device having a large, 256GB storage and the system taking its time to test its integrity.

As far as changes go, iPhone 7 is doing a big jump we've come to expect when the major number changes (e.g. iPhone 5S to iPhone 6). It just happens to be that Apple was happy to keep the general shape and size for the third generation. Personally, this seems like Apple is happy with these design decisions instead of being lazy. After all, Original iPhone style survived three generations as well until thinner design became feasible.

In any case, the packaging of the iPhone 7 is also largely the same as the previous 4.7" iPhones. Two major differences, other than the phone itself, are the photo of the iPhone on the box and the bundled EarPod earphones using the Lightning connector instead of the 3.5mm earphone jack. 3.5mm to Lightning adapter is included for those who need to use the existing earphones.


Speaking of the earphone jack, iPhone 7 indeed no longer has one as you can see here. This has been the source of much online drama, but I expect it to simmer down as time goes on, much like when Lightning connector itself was introduced with iPhone 5.

Softrong has touted their faucets' water-saving feature prominently, and I noted that it felt like it was working. But to see if it was indeed the case, I made actual measurements. No fancy equipment were necessary - just a stopwatch and a water jug would do as you can see here. After repeating and averaging, these are the results.

The Softrong shower head did indeed cut the amount of flow by roughly half across all knob settings, consistent with the company's claims. Even better, the flow rate at the highest setting became lower than the US EPA's WaterSense program standard, which is 2.0 gallons per minute or 126ml per second. The kitchen faucet also saw similarly drastic cuts, but only when the "spread" mode was used. My wife preferred the middle ground, which offers less savings but is still better than using the old faucet.

In any case, the replacements were definitely using less water if they were used for a same duration. Now I needed to see if this translated to tangible reduction in metered usage.


And here are the results. Note that, between late February and early April of 2015, Naju Bitgaram City suffered widespread contamination of tap water. It became unfit for most uses in heavily affected areas, and the city decided to not meter the water use during the affected period. However, the hot water use was still metered as you were paying the costs of heating the water, not the water use itself.

Taking this into account, tap water use hovered steadily around 13m³ (13,000L) throughout the year until the faucets were replaced. I saw a drop of around 1 to 2m³ afterwards. In the case of hot water, there had been about 1m³ reduction year-over-year (from 6m³ to 5m³ on average), but it dropped further on a similar scale as the tap water after the replacement.

Here, tap water costs about US$0.75/m³ and hot water, US$4.20/m³. So the reduction of 1m³ seen here equates to about 5 dollars in savings per month. The shower heads cost US$20 each and the kitchen faucet, US$30 - a total of US$70. That means it would only take just over a year to recover the upgrade costs. Even though the water use didn't fall dramatically, the new faucets still turned out to be good investments.