Apple’s latest flagship, the iPhone 18 Pro Max, narrowly outperforms Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra in a detailed speed test, highlighting notable improvements in handling demanding tasks and sustained performance under load.
In a new speed test, PhoneBuff placed the iPhone 18 Pro Max against Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra and found that Apple’s latest flagship edged ahead in a closely fought contest. The comparison focused on everyday-heavy tasks rather than synthetic benchmarks, with both devices asked to handle portrait photography, 4K video recording and gaming in sequence. In the opening phase, neither handset established a decisive lead, and the results remained tightly balanced for most of the round.
The first meaningful separation came during Adobe Acrobat, where the phones had to recognise text in a 25-page PDF. According to the MacMagazine report on PhoneBuff’s test, the iPhone handled that workload more efficiently and pulled into the lead for the first time, finishing the opening run around 10 seconds ahead. That marked a clear improvement over the previous generation, as the iPhone 17 Pro Max had reportedly trailed the Galaxy by roughly 30 seconds in a similar first-round comparison.
The full initial round ended in just over four minutes on the iPhone, with the Galaxy finishing about 12 seconds later. That gap is modest rather than dramatic, but it still points to a meaningful advantage for Apple in sustained app-launch and document-processing workloads. PhoneArena has separately identified the A20 Pro as Apple’s first 2nm chip, while reviews from PhoneArena and Tom’s Guide say it has an edge over Samsung’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in both CPU and GPU performance, which helps explain the result.
PhoneBuff then repeated the test after a 10-minute 4K video recording session, a useful check on whether either phone suffered from heat or performance throttling. In that second pass, the iPhone again held up better, showing almost no measurable slowdown compared with its earlier run. That makes the result more notable: it was not just fast in a cold start, but also more consistent under load. Other recent comparisons have still described the contest as close overall, with some outlets noting that Samsung can remain competitive in software launching and memory handling, but this latest speed test gives Apple the clearer practical win.
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