The main takeaway, which became resoundingly clear over the last 48 hours?

Marketing works.

Tuesday we all sat through a round up of new product announcements from Apple, with the stock boiler plates of innovation and improvement. The most amazing products yet created. The most powerful products on the market. We were shown this year’s collection of bar graphs touting the huge lead Apple hardware enjoys over the competition.

Revealing “pro” versions of the iPhone, Apple leaned heavily into video creation to showcase the new cameras and the new A13 chipset.

The iPhone 11 Pro is so powerful you can make movies on it! Just don’t pay attention to the multi-million-dollar sound-stage, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on equipment, lighting, and the talented team of filmmakers behind the phone, but I digress…

It’s those bar graphs though. Since the PowerMac days, Apple has had a love affair with simplistic, unlabeled bar graphs. We’ve seen them through so many keynotes over the last decade, that we just take them for granted. It’s just common knowledge that iPhones are more powerful than Androids.

But what happens when we test Apple’s performance claims against their video production claims?

iOS fans on Twitter get REAL flustered…

I’ve been running video rendering tests since my days at Pocketnow. Synthetic benchmarks are too easy to manipulate, and I’m kind of desperate for real world performance metrics beyond gaming. I talked about that shortly after the iPhone XS launch last year in this video:

Video production is a demanding use of any computer, so it’s one area that can help us visualize the impact on the CPU and GPU of a phone. My current test involves taking a one-minute video clip from my Panasonic G85 mirrorless camera. It’s a pretty basic h.264 clip, UHD resolution, 30fps, at a 100Mbps bitrate. It’s important to control for the video, using a separate source, so no one phone gains any kind of advantage.

The Twitter tirade started after we saw yet another “Apple Blue Line Bar Graph Better Than Android Gray Line Benchmark”. The A12 is more powerful than any Android, and the A13 will beat that!

But here’s the problem.

I truly believe Apple chips are silly powerful, but for the last four years, Apple really hasn’t let us touch that power. I shared my rendering experiences again, comparing the iPhone XS against the iPhone SE. In iMove, the iPhone SE continues to render video faster than the XS.

There’s no good explanation for this. If we’re buying new phones on the promise of better performance, then this kind of restriction (on a first party Apple app) is unforgivable. What good is “more power” if you can’t use it on something as resource intensive as creating video?

Because Apple claimed the A12 in the iPhone XS could outperform current Androids, I included some comparisons using my favorite video editing app on a OnePlus 7 Pro. iMovie isn’t on Android, and I genuinely enjoy working in PowerDirector Mobile.

Rendering the same video, the OnePlus is a LOT faster at the task than the more expensive XS. The OnePlus also delivers a final video at twice the bitrate of the iPhone (which does look better to my eye). Better quality, twice the size, in two thirds the time.

That’s when the drama REALLY started.

I wasn’t being “fair” to Apple in that comparison. According to angry people on Twitter, you’re never able to compare performance between two products unless you can test in EXACTLY the same program. Fake news!

Which to a degree, I can appreciate the idea that it’s not a perfect oranges-to-oranges test, but here’s what we have to admit when we see iMovie lose this bad.

Apple software developers, coding an app for Apple hardware, are SO bad at their jobs, that they can’t optimize iMovie to beat PowerDirector (a third party app) on an Android phone not made by PowerDirector.

As long as we’re willing to acknowledge that Apple’s hardware and software “synergy” affords NO benefit to consumers in this test, then I’m happy to concede that it’s not a “fair” test for the iPhone.

Thankfully there is a cross platform video editing app. KineMaster is available on both iOS and Android. And in a brief Twitter exchange, a former developer for KineMaster even repeated his personal experiences touting iPhones as superior to Androids for performance.

Here’s the problem though.

iPhone’s are still kind of terrible at file management. There’s no way to just add a video to the iPhone camera roll without jumping through some hoops. The iPhone XS says it can’t play the video files from my Panasonic, but you can sync them just fine to the Apple TV app. However, if a video is in Apple TV, it’s locked from other apps like video editing. In iMovie, I can import from cloud storage, but iOS prevented me from sharing my normal test video to KineMaster. I was locked out.

By comparison, when I work in Android, I pull the memory card out of my camera, plug it into my phone, and I can do whatever I want with the files I create. You know, how professionals might enjoy working out in the field.

After a couple of hours trying different syncing and sharing solutions, I gave up trying to use the control test file I’ve used for years. I couldn’t get a video ON TO the iPhone, but I can get video OFF OF the iPhone. I shot one minute of UHD/30p video and one minute of UHD/60p video and sent them to my OnePlus 7 Pro.

I need that to sink in for a second.

To compare performance, the iPhone will be rendering video FROM the iPhone. The OnePlus, which normally shoots MP4, will be rendering an Apple created MOV. In terms of testing, this is about as big an advantage as I could give to the iPhone. Same app. Same video file. Push render, and this happened:

It’s not even close.

Apple likes to make big claims. I’m actually thankful that Apple promotes mobile video production. I’ve been trying to get people to do more from their phones for years. I feel like folks have been overbuying on their pocket computers, and not really getting their money’s worth. This is one area where our phones can genuinely outperform most consumer laptops.

The reality of using an iPhone for this kind of work borders on misery though. The iPhone can only work for you if you use it in exactly the way that Apple thinks you should. From video capture to file management, and only on accessories and services that play nice with iOS. There’s not much flexibility. One tool off the reservation, like my Panasonic camera, and you’re instantly roadblocked. I’m not going to choose what camera I shoot on for work, based on what phone can use that footage. That’s backwards.

The most galling aspect of this “Pro” iPhone discussion, most of these workflow issues would be fixed if iOS could inherit the same updates Apple delivered in iPadOS. Namely better support for file management. According to Apple, you need to buy a completely different computer just to read a memory card, but I digress again…

When you jump through all those hoops, when you change your workflow to appease your phone, you’re still “rewarded” with a slower overall experience.

These tweets kinda blew up. More than a few folks were genuinely surprised. People aren’t used to Apple getting challenged like this, and not a lot of people knew that Apple has been struggling here for a couple years now.

The purpose of this kind of testing is NEVER to shame a consumer who genuinely enjoys the product they own. I’m never going to be the guy who tells you how you should spend your cash.

Instead, tech reviewers have neglected their responsibilities in holding companies accountable, especially judging popular products against the manufacturer’s marketing claims. All things being equal, video performance on an iPhone is still “very good”, but it absolutely doesn’t live up to the expectations set by Apple PR.

Of course, now a small group of Apple fanboys are requesting I move the goalposts again. I need to be MORE FAIR STILL to the iPhone. Comparing iMovie to PowerDirector? Not fair! Comparing KineMaster on Android vs iOS? Still not fair!

Now the “true” test should be using the absolute best app on each platform! I should be comparing Luma Touch on the iPhone against PowerDirector on the OnePlus!

I’m kinda done shooting videos of every single render test combination we can come up with, but I have run those comparisons over the last year. Luma on the iPhone XS, and PowerDirector on a premium Android.

The iPhone XS still lost. By quite a bit.

Would you like to get started editing video on your phone? Here are my top 5 tips to get you started!

***UPDATE – 1***

What the hell. One more speed test for the road.

Here’s the iPhone XS running Luma Touch against the LG V30 running PowerDirector. “Standard quality” on Luma is pretty close to “High Quality” on PowerDirector. Let’s see if the iPhone XS can beat an LG from 2017…

***UPDATE – 2***

Big thanks to all the folks who weighed in on my file transfer issues. I still can’t find a direct connection method to import my Panasonic footage into the iPhone camera roll, but if I transfer it through my NAS, I can import that back to the phone. Whew. This just made my life a LOT easier! You tech nerds rock!