When the original TaylorMade P790 arrived in 2017, it offered something genuinely different. It looked like an iron aimed at accomplished golfers, yet beneath its relatively compact shape sat a hollow-body construction, a thin face and SpeedFoam.
The proposition was easy to understand: deliver some of the ball speed and forgiveness associated with game-improvement irons without asking golfers to play something that looked like one.
Eight years later, TaylorMade has reached the fifth generation of the P790.
Along the way, faces have become thinner, tungsten has moved around the head, SpeedFoam has evolved into SpeedFoam Air, centre of gravity locations have changed, individual irons have been optimised differently and, for the 2025 model, TaylorMade introduced a new 4340M forged face material.
According to the manufacturer, the P790 has therefore never stopped improving.
But there is another, arguably more useful question for golfers:
How much has the golfer actually gained?
Those are two very different questions.
In 2017, the innovation was easy to identify
It would be unfair to dismiss the P790 story as a succession of marketing campaigns.
The original model combined a hollow-body construction with a relatively thin forged face, tungsten weighting, a Speed Pocket and, most notably, SpeedFoam injected inside the head.
TaylorMade was attempting to solve a genuine contradiction: how could an iron provide additional speed and forgiveness while retaining the appearance and feel better players expected?
The concept proved influential enough to help establish what is now one of the most familiar categories in the equipment market: the players-distance iron.
The P790 was not a traditional blade.
Nor was it a conventional game-improvement iron.
That was precisely the point.
A Golf Monthly test of the original model illustrated the performance philosophy rather well. With the 7-iron, which had 30.5 degrees of loft, the tester averaged 181 yards of carry on a GCQuad launch monitor, with 4,669rpm of spin.
That was serious distance.
But it also raised a question that remains relevant today: how much of a distance gain comes from the technology inside the clubhead, and how much comes from the geometry of the club itself — particularly loft?
2019: improving a concept that already worked
Just two years after the original launch, TaylorMade introduced the second-generation P790.
The company said the face was 7% thinner, tungsten mass had increased by 15%, the centre of gravity had been lowered and the geometry of the head had evolved. Progressive Inverted Cone Technology was also introduced to improve performance across a larger area of the face.
Something important was already happening.
The fundamental problem had been addressed in 2017. TaylorMade no longer needed to invent the P790.
It needed to refine it.
That distinction would increasingly define the generations that followed.
2021: 69% lighter does not mean 69% better
The third generation provides an excellent example of why equipment marketing numbers need context.
TaylorMade replaced SpeedFoam with SpeedFoam Air, which it said was 69% less dense.
Sixty-nine per cent sounds enormous.
The actual saving was approximately 3.5 grams per clubhead.
Those few grams mattered from an engineering perspective because they could be redistributed elsewhere. Combined with other construction changes, TaylorMade was able to substantially increase the amount of tungsten used and alter the centre of gravity. In some irons, the company said tungsten mass increased from 13.8g to 31g.
TaylorMade also claimed a sweet spot up to 60% larger than that of the original P790.
None of these figures need to be misleading to illustrate the problem.
“69% lighter” describes a characteristic of a material. It does not mean 69% more distance, 69% more forgiveness or — obviously — 69% fewer shots on a scorecard.
This is where a technical characteristic and a benefit to the golfer can easily begin to blur.
By 2023, distance was no longer the whole story
The fourth-generation P790 is particularly interesting because TaylorMade began to focus more explicitly on consistency throughout the set.
FLTD CG was introduced. The centre of gravity was positioned lower in the long irons before progressively moving higher in the shorter clubs.
The rationale was straightforward: promote launch and forgiveness at the long end of the set while delivering more appropriate trajectories and control in the scoring clubs.
The forged 4140 face reached 1.56mm at its thinnest point, while TaylorMade also revised the internal construction and introduced an internal sound-stabilisation bar.
By this stage, the P790 was illustrating how mature the players-distance category had become.
The objective was no longer simply to make the golf ball travel faster.
Engineers were working on CG location, ball-speed retention on off-centre strikes, gapping, launch characteristics, sound, feel and turf interaction.
In other words, the improvements were becoming more subtle.
Then came the 2025 P790 — and another 24% figure
For the fifth generation, TaylorMade introduced a forged 4340M face material, which the company says is 20% stronger than the material used in previous generations.
That additional strength allows the face to be made thinner. TaylorMade says the result is increased ball speed and distance, while the effective sweet spot is up to 24% larger than on the 2023 P790 7-iron.
Again, this represents a perfectly plausible engineering improvement.
But consider the chain of causation:
20% stronger material → potentially thinner face → greater face flex → potential increase in ball speed → possible increase in distance.
The golfer has not gained 20%.
Nor has the golfer necessarily gained 24% because the sweet spot is said to be 24% larger.
That figure immediately raises another question: exactly how is the boundary of the “sweet spot” being defined?
TaylorMade’s public information establishes the comparison — the 2025 7-iron against the 2023 7-iron — but does not provide enough information to translate that 24% into a universal number of yards gained or a reduction in dispersion for an individual golfer.
And those would arguably be the more useful numbers.
Independent testing tells a less dramatic story
With more than a year of perspective on the 2025 P790, we can also move beyond launch-day claims.
And independent testing tells an interesting story.
Golf Monthly tested the 2025 and 2023 P790 back-to-back and found the improvements more apparent in the subtleties than in dramatic launch-monitor gains. Ball-speed retention on mishits, feel, sole design and the refined appearance were among the areas highlighted.
That distinction matters.
A new iron does not have to produce another ten yards to represent technical progress.
If it produces the golfer’s intended distance more frequently across a larger part of the face, that may be a more meaningful improvement than increasing the distance of the best strike.
Other comparative testing has found only modest ball-speed differences between the 2023 and 2025 generations.
Such tests should not be treated as universal truths. One golfer, one shaft, one ball and one swing speed cannot represent an entire golfing population.
But they help put the scale of the improvement into perspective.
We are not looking at a revolution.
And that is not necessarily a criticism of the P790.
Loft has been evolving too
There is another detail worth considering when discussing distance.
The 2023 P790 7-iron had 30.5 degrees of loft. The 2025 version has 30 degrees.
The 8-iron moved from 35 to 34 degrees, the 9-iron from 40 to 39 degrees and the pitching wedge from 45 to 44 degrees.
Half a degree on a 7-iron obviously cannot explain every performance difference between two generations.
But it reinforces one of the basic rules of club comparison:
The number stamped on the sole is not a unit of measurement.
Comparing two 7-irons without checking loft, length, shaft specification and other characteristics can result in technology receiving credit for a performance gain that is partly produced by the specification of the club.
That was true in 2017.
It remains true in 2026.
So what have eight years of progress actually delivered?
This is where the P790 story becomes much more interesting than the usual “new versus old” equipment comparison.
There has been progress.
But the nature of that progress has changed.
Between 2017 and 2025, TaylorMade has worked on face thickness, mass distribution, tungsten weighting, internal foam density, centre of gravity location, ball-speed retention on off-centre impacts, trajectory throughout the set, sound, feel, sole geometry and, most recently, face material.
It would nevertheless be meaningless to add together all the percentages announced over those eight years.
A sweet spot claimed to be up to 60% larger in 2021 than in 2017, followed by one claimed to be up to 24% larger in 2025 than in 2023, tells us nothing about how many shots a golfer should expect to save.
Those percentages simply do not measure the same thing as a scorecard.
It is one of the central distinctions we make in Think Before You Swing: technical progress is not necessarily a measurable gain. A measurable gain is not necessarily a benefit for a particular golfer. And a benefit for that golfer does not automatically translate into lower scores.
That distinction matters far beyond the P790.
Should you replace an older P790 with the 2025 model?
There cannot be a universal answer.
A golfer still playing the original 2017 P790 may reasonably find that the accumulation of incremental improvements over five generations produces enough of a difference to justify testing the latest model.
For someone already playing the 2023 P790, the case is quite different.
The evidence available points more towards refinement than transformation.
That does not mean an individual golfer cannot gain something significant from changing.
It means that gain needs to be measured rather than assumed.
The testing protocol does not need to be particularly complicated. Use the same golf ball, comparable conditions and suitably matched shafts wherever possible. More importantly, do not compare the best shot from each club.
Compare average carry distance, dispersion, distance loss on mishits, peak height, spin and the distance gaps between clubs.
And pay attention to strike location.
A club that produces the same best shot but makes your poorer strikes significantly better could represent genuine progress.
The question therefore changes from:
“Is the 2025 P790 better?”
to:
“Is the 2025 P790 sufficiently better for me to justify changing?”
Those questions sound similar.
They are not.
The P790 tells the story of modern golf equipment
Perhaps the most interesting lesson from these eight years is not which generation of P790 is best.
It is what happens when a genuinely innovative product gradually reaches maturity.
In 2017, TaylorMade could change the fundamental architecture of an iron and present golfers with a relatively new proposition.
By 2025, engineers are fighting for increasingly sophisticated gains: a few grams redistributed inside the head, fractions of a degree, a different grade of steel, another reduction in face thickness, revised sole geometry or a larger effective hitting area.
Those improvements can be real.
Some involve impressive engineering.
But the golf industry then faces another challenge: turning an incremental engineering improvement into a sufficiently compelling reason for somebody to buy another set of irons.
That is where the machinery of continuous innovation meets the machinery of continuous marketing.
The engineer’s job is to create a difference.
The marketer’s job is to make that difference desirable.
The golfer has a third job: to determine whether that difference is actually useful.
After five generations, that may be the most revealing way to look at the TaylorMade P790.
Not by asking whether the 2025 model is technically superior to the original — on numerous measurable criteria, it is — but by separating four very different questions:
Is the club technically different?
Is the gain measurable?
Does that gain address a problem in your game?
And is it likely to improve what happens on the golf course?
Eight years after the original P790, the answer to the first question is clearly yes.
For the other three, the launch monitor — and the golfer — still have the final say.