I hate to be that someone who just bought a 32GB iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus because the answer is yes, the 32GB models of Apple’s latest iPhones are indeed slower.
Q:Is the 32GB iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus really slower than the 128GB and 256GB models?
I hate to be that someone who just bought a 32GB iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus because the answer is yes, the 32GB models of Apple’s latest iPhones are indeed slower. But why? Why would a phone that has largely the same components be slower? The answer has to do with storage capacity.
iPhones use NAND memory, which is the same as SSDs. And if you have looked through the specifications for SSDs, you might notice that performance increases as capacity goes up. That has to do something known as NAND parallelism. To fully explain this would require us to dive into a NAND die and talk about planes, blocks, and pages, which is as confusing as it is boring. But to put it simply, every device that uses NAND memory is managed by a NAND controller.
The NAND controller is actually capable of reading and writing to multiple NAND chips at once. When capacity goes up, so does the number of NAND chips. This means there are more NAND chips for the SSD controller to read and write to any at one time. And this explains, albeit very simply, why larger capacity SSDs and iPhones have better performance.
