Calorie for calorie though, the nutrition charts still say consistently that dried fruit has somewhat more iron than fresh.

I don't know why, because the nutrition analyses ignore any "subtleties" like what can be absorbed by the body and what can't. Obviously the charts depend on the fiction that food is fungible, so maybe it's something as simple as different varieties being used for drying vs. fresh consumption, or fruit being picked at different states of maturity for each.