The iPhone 18 Pro Is More Powerful Than Some Laptops - Here's How

After Apple's September 2026 launch event, the iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable, got most of the attention, and there wasn't much fanfare over the iPhone 18 and iPhone 18 Pro. Some users were left disappointed by the new pro-level iPhone. Even if the battery on the iPhone 18 Pro line beats that of its predecessor, the update is very similar to its predecessor. But benchmark testing of the A20 Pro chip has boosted the new line's profile, offering excellent performance.

According to Geekbench 6 benchmark tests conducted during our iPhone 18 Pro review, the Apple A20 Pro chip that powers the iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pro scored 4,735 in single-core and 12,545 in multi-core performance. Running that same benchmark for the previous incarnation of Apple's mobile chip, the A19 Pro, scored 3,800 and 10,000 for single-core and multi-core performance, respectively. The company advertised the newer chip as the fastest mobile CPU and claimed it delivered a 20% performance boost over the previous model. 

Some phones routinely beat old laptops in performance benchmarks, and the A20 Pro does too. With its 4.93 GHz clock speed and benchmark scores, it can compete with some recent computer chips, including the Apple M5 Max, at least in single-core operation. It also offers similar results to the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 desktop processor. With the A20 Pro chip, Apple moved to a new 2nm manufacturing process, while also redesigning the CPU with two new super cores and four new efficiency cores to boost performance and power efficiency.

While the A20 Pro chip may be less powerful at multi-core operations than the Apple M5 Max, it takes the cake in single-core performance according to Geekbench 6 benchmarks. That's not much of a surprise considering that the M5 Max clock speed is 4.61 GHz. The iPhone 18 Pro Max being technically faster in single-core mode than the 2026 MacBook Pro is an impressive feat, but the phone is much more powerful than the MacBook Neo, which sports the older A18 Pro chip. It seems that the iPhone 18 Pro Max will even be more powerful than the Neo 2 — Apple's upcoming laptop that's expected to come with the A19 Pro chip.

As a clear answer to the M5 chips that fell a bit short in real-world performance, it's only fair to mention Qualcomm's SD X2E-94-100 (X2 for short). It has a single-core score of 3,800 and a multi-core one of 22,750. Thus, Apple's A20 Pro chip blows it out of the water in terms of single-core performance. The new iPhone's single-core performance is better than a multitude of X2 laptops that came out recently. The list includes the popular Asus ZenBook A16, Microsoft Surface, and HP OmniBook Ultra 14.

Mentioning older laptops is unnecessary, since even the Apple 17 Pro Max was technically more powerful than a laptop you could purchase a few years ago. It only goes to show how fast technology is progressing. Whether this will force us to buy new laptops remains to be seen — a lot of it depends on whether users will notice a massive difference in the performance from Apple's latest chipset.