The iPhone 18 Pro is a transcription monster
Apple made a big deal out of the AI capabilities in their new A20 Pro processor in their new iPhone marketing. They've doubled the number of cores in the neural engine, and this made me immediately wonder how much better that makes this device for transcriptions. This is exactly why I built a benchmark mode into Quick Subtitles. So I ran it on my iPhone 17 Pro, the 18 Pro, and just for kicks, my M4 Pro MacBook Pro.
Testing Methodology
This is using the built-in benchmark mode of Quick Subtitles using the built-in file. I used the built-in file to try to make this as replicable as possible. You could run this exact test on this exact file and see what your results are as well.
I ran the test using Apple's transcription model. I let it do one warm-up, which can skew timings a little bit because loading the model the first time can be disruptive, and I let it run 20 tests in succession. The intention here was to find not only the max speed each device could achieve, but also to see what happened once they started to feel the burn.
Disclaimer: If anything, this test is unfair to the iPhone 18 Pro, which has only been set up for about two hours and is surely still going through its process of indexing and all those things it needs to do at setup. My impression is that when a high-intensity job like this starts up, those background processes take a pause. But either way, that's worth noting, as theoretically there's more performance here, even if it's marginal.
Results
This is a pretty enormous year-on-year upgrade with a 50% jump in peak performance over last year. It took a bit longer for it to start warming up, but once it did, it actually warmed up quicker than the iPhone 17 Pro. To be clear, this wasn't just in the metrics. I could also feel the temperature difference in the hand. The 18 Pro was definitely a bit hotter.
I also always think it's funny to look at the throttling for this specific task across iPhones and MacBook Pros. iPhones always start out really high, and then after a couple minutes will throttle down and settle somewhere. Not terrible, but not quite at their peak. Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro just starts going and will literally just keep in the same performance window from now until the end of time.
Given how much the A20 Pro seemingly shares with the upcoming M6 processor, I imagine the new M6-powered Mac Mini will be an absolute beast for transcription.