In 2009, John Gruber predicted that a 2014 iPhone would match a then-current MacBook Pro. He was right. He was also too conservative. Seventeen years of compute, charted.
"If a 2007 iPhone is loosely equivalent in terms of computing power to a 2000 PowerBook or 1999 Power Mac, that puts the spread at around seven or eight years. Extrapolate forward, and it's therefore not at all unreasonable to think that a 2014 iPhone will pack the computing power of today's MacBook Pro."
— John Gruber, Daring Fireball, 2009Gruber wrote that in 2009, sketching what felt like an ambitious extrapolation. Seventeen years later, the prediction looks almost timid. The iPhone didn't just catch the MacBook Pro Gruber was looking at; it caught the current one. As of September 2025, the iPhone 17 Pro's single-core Geekbench 6 score (3,895) edges out the M4 Pro MacBook Pro (3,852). The phone in your pocket has higher single-threaded CPU performance than the highest-end laptop Apple was selling last year.
This is the story of how the gap closed, told as a sequence of 1:1 pairings: each iPhone matched against the Mac it was roughly equivalent to at the moment it shipped.
Start with the endpoints. The original 2007 iPhone shipped with a 412 MHz ARM 11 and 128 MB of RAM — roughly the compute envelope of the 2000 PowerBook G3 "Pismo," a seven-year-old laptop at the time. The 2025 iPhone 17 Pro ships with a 4.26 GHz six-core A19 Pro, 12 GB of RAM, 19 billion transistors, and a vapor chamber. It is, by single-core Geekbench, a peer of the current MacBook Pro.
On a logarithmic scale — required, because the iPhone went from a Geekbench 6 equivalent of ~15 to ~3,895 — the shape of the curve is what matters. The purple line gets steeper while the gray line maintains a roughly constant slope. The iPhone wasn't keeping pace with the Mac. It was accelerating relative to it.
Apple Silicon isn't a new chip family in the Mac. It's an iPhone chip that grew up.
The table below pairs each iPhone with the Mac that was roughly its compute peer at the moment of release. Read it top to bottom as one device chasing, catching, and finally overtaking the other.
| Year | iPhone | ≈ Equivalent Mac | The gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | iPhone (1st gen) 412 MHz ARM 11, 128 MB |
PowerBook G3 "Pismo" 2000 · 500 MHz G3 |
7-year deficit |
| 2010 | iPhone 4 A4, 800 MHz, 512 MB |
PowerBook G4 2003 · 867 MHz |
7–8 years |
| 2013 | iPhone 5s — first 64-bit phone A7, 1.3 GHz, 1 GB |
MacBook 2008 · Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz |
5 years — inflection |
| 2014 | iPhone 6 A8, 1.4 GHz, 1 GB |
MacBook Pro 2009 · Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz |
5 years — Gruber's bet lands |
| 2017 | iPhone X A11 Bionic, 2.39 GHz, 3 GB |
MacBook Pro 13" 2015 · Core i5 |
2 years |
| 2020 | iPhone 12 Pro A14, 3.1 GHz, 6 GB · 5nm |
MacBook Pro 13" 2019 · Core i7 |
1 year |
| 2021 | iPhone 13 Pro A15, 6 GB |
MacBook Air (M1) 2020 · Apple Silicon |
Same family |
| 2023 | iPhone 15 Pro — hardware RT A17 Pro, 3.78 GHz, 8 GB |
MacBook Air (M2) 2022 · Apple Silicon |
Parallel |
| 2024 | iPhone 16 Pro A18 Pro, 4.04 GHz, 8 GB |
MacBook Air (M3) 2024 · Apple Silicon |
Same year, same tier |
| 2025 | iPhone 17 Pro A19 Pro, 4.26 GHz, 12 GB |
MacBook Pro 14" (M4 Pro) 2024 · single-core |
iPhone wins (3,895 vs 3,852) |
The 2013 inflection. The A7 in the iPhone 5s was the first 64-bit smartphone chip. Before this, the iPhone was tracking laptop progress at a constant lag. After this, it began outpacing it. The A9 the following year would score 57% better single-core than the A8 it replaced. The architectural move to 64-bit set up every gain that followed.
The 2021 crossover. The M1 ships in the MacBook Air, and the iPhone-to-Mac comparison stops being a comparison. It becomes a shared family tree. The same engineering organization, the same instruction set, the same memory architecture — scaled differently for the two enclosures, but no longer fundamentally different.
The 2025 endpoint. The A19 Pro's single-core (3,895) is, by a hair, ahead of the M4 Pro MacBook Pro (3,852) — and ahead of AMD's flagship desktop Ryzen 9 9950X (3,482) in the same test. The MacBook still wins on multi-core because it has more cores and a thermal envelope a phone can't match. But on a per-core basis, the iPhone is no longer chasing anything. It's the reference point.
Gruber's 2009 framing assumed the iPhone would always be the apprentice — a smaller, slower derivative of the real computer on the desk. The honest read of the seventeen years that followed is that the apprenticeship reversed somewhere around 2018. The iPhone became the place Apple invested its hardest engineering, and the Mac became the place that benefit was scaled up and given more room to breathe.
Which is to say: the iPhone didn't catch up to the Mac. The Mac caught up to the iPhone.