Apple’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are now almost a month old, and in general, they have both been well received. While one or two small issues have arisen here and there, there have been no overblown dramas unlike previous releases of Apple’s flagship products, and that’s great news. But it doesn’t mean that something isn’t just around the corner.

Take this new report as a prime example, because while it is still early days, it has the potential to have quite the impact if third-party tests can confirm this theory. That theory? The 32GB iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus uses storage that is considerably slower to write data than other capacities.

Based on findings across both synthetic and real-world tests, it would appear that the storage Apple is using in at least some of its 32GB iPhones is noticeably less speedy than say, the storage used in 128GB models. While the synthetic benchmarks used first alerted to the issue, it’s a real-world test that was devised that best illustrates the issue as it currently stands.

…benchmarks are synthetic, and we wanted to see how this slower storage relates to real-life performance. So we came up with the following test: we shot a 10-minute 4K video with the iPhone, and we then trimmed it exactly in half using the built-in trimming feature of the standard Photos app. We then timed how long it takes the three iPhones to complete the operation of saving the trim as a new file.

The results of that test, and especially when tied into the synthetic results gathered, show quite the interesting story.

Based on the table above, it would certainly appear that the hardware used for testing – a 32GB iPhone 7 Plus – performs considerably worse than 64GB and 128GB flavors of Apple’s new flagship. Just look at that PassMark write speed, for example.

Now, it is possible that there is more at play here and that the storage has nothing to do with the results, but such a difference is one that seems worthy of questioning. Are Apple’s smaller capacity iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus simply slower than their more well-endowed brethren?

We await further testing before we can be sure as to the answer to that question.

Update: Here’s a video proof showing write speed on 32GB iPhone 7 being significantly slower than higher-end capacity models:

(Source: GSMArena)

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