Apple is not leading in everything when it comes to hardware. The iPhone is generally considered a fairly smooth smartphone due to its iOS operating system and tight integration with its own hardware. Apple has strict control over its software and hardware, which allows them to carefully optimize older iPhones when a new version of iOS is released, ensuring that the system runs smoothly in most cases.
So will the iPhone 12 from 4 years ago perform well? A practical test was done below to see if the iPhone 12 is capable of current daily use.
Many people choose the iPhone because of its smooth performance that “is still smooth after being used for several years”, and this is inseparable from its processor performance. Apple's self-developed A series chips have always been the biggest selling point of new iPhone products, and this iPhone 12 series is no exception - equipped with the latest A14 bionic chip.
The entire iPhone 12 series is equipped with the Apple A14 Bionic processor based on the 5nm process; and uses a "high-frequency version" of LPDDR4X memory, with 4GB RAM for iPhone 12 and 6GB RAM for iPhone 12 Pro; in terms of storage, it uses NVMe protocol flash memory like previous generations of iPhones.
The A14 Bionic processor on iPhone 12 uses the latest 5nm process technology and integrates 11.8 billion transistors, which greatly improves performance and energy efficiency. It adopts a new 6-core central processor with four energy-efficient cores and two high-performance cores, and its running speed is 40% higher than that of A12; a 4-core graphics processor is 30% faster than A12.
Judging from the results, the iPhone 12 has no pressure when running "Honor of Kings" and the curve is as stable as a straight line. However, after encountering "Genshin Impact", there is a landslide. The frame rate curve fluctuates violently and even drops frames. The frame drops are especially obvious in battle scenes. Taken together, the performance of the iPhone 12 is enhanced by the A14, and the experience is still very good. As long as it is not a game with complex modeling and rendering like "Genshin Impact", it can run smoothly without any pressure.
In addition to extreme game operation, the author also tested the daily usage experience and simulated the most common usage scenarios. WeChat and DingTalk were hung in the background, and Douyin and Weibo were used. The results are obvious. Daily use of iPhone 12 is very smooth and there are no problems at all, except for battery aging and power loss faster.
Taken together, there is no problem in daily use of iPhone 12. Large-scale games such as "Genshin Impact" are a bit difficult, but games such as "King of Kings" can run smoothly.
The optimization of the iPhone is indeed good, but as a flagship phone priced at 6,000 yuan, it should have such qualities. But Apple hasn't made changes in years now. If a mobile phone cannot be used, it is mostly because the memory is insufficient or the battery is severely degraded.
However, Apple's memory and batteries are very expensive, so everyone should consider this when buying an iPhone.