> In light of these factors, I would give the iPhone 6s line the Editors’ Choice Gold award. I believe that the criteria for this award is such that a product is not only one of the best in its category and an extremely good product in a vacuum, but pushes the smartphone user experience forward in significant ways.
That's quite an endorsement, that is quite rare from Anandtech, if I've been following correctly.
I'm not always a huge fan of the iPhone, but I have to say that, after testing the 6S, it's really tempting.
I don't like the iphone 6 line. They are too big. I bike and run with my phone all the time and don't like having a clunker strapped to my arm. I got rid of the 6 and got a 5c and I like it way more. Just as fast as an iphone6 and 1/3 the price. By just as fast, I mean for normal use - not playing games and using crazy apps (which I don't do)
I recently downgraded from a 6 to a 5S almost entirely over size issues. If my thumb cannot reach the url bar of the browser and all of the keyboard without repositioning my hand, the phone is too big.
I know on the 6 you can double tap the home key to bring the screen down, but that is a bandaid. I also found the double tap unresponsive sometimes, often having to try two or three times, in which time I could have just repositioned my hand.
I feel the same way, and at this point I'm just holding out for some kind of iPhone Nano product line next year.
What puzzles me is that I don't know anybody else who feels like this. Most people are surprised at me, or don't seem to notice that they suddenly need two hands to operate their smartphone.
I would have to disagree. I love the large form factor of the 6 Plus. Now that I have been using it for a year, I have learned to hardly notice the big footprint that it has. I am probably on the extreme side as to how often I use the device, so for me I can't immagine going back to a teeny screen.
I am also a tall guy with long fingers so usually I do not have to re-position the phone to reach everything. When I do, I can do it with one hand pretty smoothly now with a year of daily practice.
I do have to say, that any bigger and it would be too big. I can also see that someone who is less willing to compromise on drawbacks of a large screen would not like it.
If apple can get a gps chip into the Apple Watch and someone releases a good Bluetooth headphone I'd be perfectly fine with the 6 plus since I wouldn't have to take it with me.
I think all phones are too big - I have stuck with my iPhone 4s purely because it is so easy to carry around and does everything I want. Please Apple release an iPhone nano.
I currently own a 5C and I think I'll eventually replace it with a 5S. The iPhone 6/6S can fit my hand also, but it's not really as comfortable as the 5S and below were.
I wonder, how many years iPhone 6S will be able to stay relevant. For example iPhone 4S started lagging on iOS 7. While it's certainly usable on iOS 9, it feels as an old and underpowered device.
If you have powerful computer from 2010, it'll happily run Windows 10 and almost any application, including almost any game in medium (or even high) mode. I wonder, whether this race on mobile platform will continue or iPhone 6S will be able to run iOS 15 without any lags?
On an unrelated note, I really don't understand, why iOS 9 (actually iOS 7+) is so slow on iPhone 4S. I was able to run powerful 3D games on that phone. Like a lot of shaders, triangles, special effects, and so on. This phone actually has good enough GPU. Why simple sliding animation could lag? Why opening "Settings" app takes few seconds? That's crazy. Probably there are good technical reasons for that, but I just don't understand, what they could be. Sometimes I think that there is intentional performance bottlenecks for old phones, so people would want to buy a new ones. I has the chance to compare iOS 6 and iOS 8/9 on the same phone, and difference is huge.
> If you have powerful computer from 2010, it'll happily run Windows 10 and almost any application, including almost any game in medium (or even high) mode. I wonder, whether this race on mobile platform will continue or iPhone 6S will be able to run iOS 15 without any lags?
I'm not sure the comparison to PCs is fair. Smartphones are still pretty young, and both the OS and chipsets make large leaps every year. If the pace of progress were as fast in the PC industry, you'd also expect a 5-year-old laptop to be unable to keep up.
I expect the pace of progress will slow down for smartphones. Consequently, the iPhone 6S will be usable for longer than the iPhone 4S.
You are basing your comparison of desktop computers as you are now. Smartphones are more like desktop computers in the 90's. The rate of change was so great, that even a 3 year old computer felt sluggish on a new operating system and often needed settings turned down. (Think 486 vs Pentium).
I wonder, how many years iPhone 6S will be able to stay relevant. For example iPhone 4S started lagging on iOS 7. While it's certainly usable on iOS 9, it feels as an old and underpowered device.
The iPhone 4s used the A5, an 800 mhz 32-bit processor with 512MB of RAM.
From the review, the iPhone 6s is a 64-bit processor with access to 2GB of RAM. And with the advancements announced at WWDC like App Thinning and LLVM and Swift optimizations, we may be close to the end of seeing any noticeable slowdown in the foreseeable future of these devices.
> On an unrelated note, I really don't understand, why iOS 9 (actually iOS 7+) is so slow on iPhone 4S.
This bothers me a lot, and cynical as I am I suspect that this is on purpose and Apple's way to encourage people to upgrade to a new phone. My wife has a four years old MacBook Pro, which after two years inexplicably started to slow down more and more to the point where the most trivial tasks like opening a menu became a major pain. It is very hard to imagine legitimate reasons for why this should happen, especially since my wife installed a bunch of programs when the computer was new and since then did not change anything.
Is it just closed source software that does this? With a lot of the big open source projects one can expect incremental speed improvements with every release (although this is far from guaranteed). My LAMP stack is quicker than it was a few years ago, not slower. With my own coding efforts I consider bloat and speed to be really important. Slower is not better unless there are some major features that have been added and not refactored yet. At Apple do they just go anti-pattern? Define the array inside the for loop rather than just do it before entering the loop?
Maybe when iOS 15 comes along someone will put iOS 9 on it somehow and it will blaze along. I doubt it, but I would not be at all surprised if the delays in opening apps are the same in iOS 15 and the hardware that goes with it. There should be a 'Moore's Constant' for this, to describe how all advances in silicon are instantly negated by operating systems at boot time to have a consistent amount of delay when opening apps.
I also have an iPhone 4S. I wondered the same thing. It's really annoying. My guess is that the memory requirements have increased a lot. It kind of still feels fast after a fresh boot. But after a few hours, it feels really slow. Some bigger applications fail at the first run, maybe because too less memory. Some will crash when I open an embedded Safari page. Also, when switching apps, in almost all cases, it has to restart the app.
Also, the battery duration has become worse. But that might also just be its age - although not sure.
Now, just because of that, I'm thinking about buying a new phone.
I wonder, is this similar for Android phones? When I buy a high-end Android phone now, can I expect it to still run fast in 3-5 years or so the future current version of Android?
I had the 4S and was itching for a replacement/upgrade at the 2 year mark. Now I'm on a 5S and I don't think it's lost much at 2 years old - it's maybe gone from "lightning fast" to "fast" in that time, but a raft of convenient added features make that a worthy tradeoff. So Apple are laying the sense of "planned obsolescence" to rest, for me at least. I think they were just pushing against a lot of hardware boundaries in the iPhone's early years.
There are definitely not any intentional performance bottlenecks; that's just absurd.
The 4S is now 4 years old. That is a long time. The 4S is also 2 full years older than the first-ever 64-bit smartphone, the iPhone 5S, which really was a tremendous performance leap.
That's going to depend on whether Apple can be trusted to support their hardware indefinitely or whether they will decide to drop support to force people to give them more money.
A much safer bet would be a popular Android device, where anyone can port the latest Android version to the device and there is no monetary interest in not doing so, and thus it's likely that updates will be available forever.
Wow, thanks anandtech, I didn't know about the 3d touch on the keyboard to enable the "trackpad cursor mode." That should double my text input speed when I make a mistake (often) while being much less annoying than the old way (touch/wait/magnifying glass/retry).
I've felt ambivalent about 3d touch until now.
Now if I could get a dark UI theme on it my last gripe would go away. (No, negative is not good enough ;)
I was super excited about this feature. In practice, it's nice for moving the cursor a long way quickly, but the finer stuff isn't any faster. It also tends to shift as I left my finger so it makes being precise difficult.
The iPhone 6s Plus I have is a wonderful phone, but I can't help but feel that Apple is losing some of it's perfection. There are some obvious UI annoyances that are present.
Such as, the Plus is a large phone so you most often open it with the phone tilted somehow, giving you landscape mode. It does not easily revert to the upright state without juggling it around, nor is there an option to not go landscape on the home screen only (seriously who needs that?). It's not even in the settings menu to disable rotation entirely - you have to find it in the pull up menu.
Another gripe I have is that all the pull up and down menus also trigger when you don't want it. The screen has gotten really sensitive, which is great, but there are lots of unintended effects now.
A fanatical user running the company wouldn't have overlooked this.
I've noticed more software bugs in the last couple of iOS releases than previously. Sometimes the top status bar (time, battery, rotation lock/silence symbols, etc.) will disappear, fail to change colour, etc. Sometimes apps think they're in landscape when the phone itself thinks it's in portrait, making the app half the height and twice the width of the screen. On iOS9 specifically, sometimes the touch digitiser just stops working and I have to force a reboot.
There's also small things that seem unpolished to the traditional "Apple" level. For example even 2 years after the iOS7 release, the size of the status bar at the top changes between the lock screen and the homescreen, which means that not only does text size change but also the number of symbols that show up near the battery display changes too if you're right at the limit of real estate there. Yes, it's minor, but stuff like that didn't seem to happen several generations ago, but I'm noticing it more and more.
What drives me nuts about my 6s is the way they moved the power button from the top of the phone to the opposite (long) side as the volume buttons. This guarantees that I cannot pull the phone out of my pocket without hitting one button or another inadvertently, and also makes it likely that the button I press first will be a volume button rather than the power button I wanted.
I'd like to grab the iPhone's product designer by his or her (designer) lapel and make one thing very clear: I should not have to look at my phone in order to turn it on, or to orient it for use.
This stuff should be obvious basic ergonomics, but ever since they released the infamous iPhone 4 with its perfectly symmetrical surfaces, they've always felt compelled to do at least one minor but annoying thing wrong. My previous iPhone 5 was a nice exception, but like its predecessors, it was just too small.
Gotta love all these First World problems, I suppose.
It's not a great solution, but last time I tried it "zoomed" display mode made it behave more like the old mode... less like an iPad. The home screen doesn't rotate, etc.
The down side, of course, is that you lose some screen real-estate in your apps. They do need an option just for the home screen.
I have an iPhone 6s Plus, which I love, and almost never use landscape mode to reach UI controls. I am quite sure Tim Cook is a fanatical user of Apple products.
I've never used a 6 Plus or 6S Plus. Does the rotation lock not work on it like it does on the iPad? That seems like a strange oversight, it's not like it should be running through substantially different code paths.
I'm mostly an Android user and now I have an iPhone 6s, received as a gift - this is actually the third iPhone I'm receiving as a gift, the first one was a 3GS. I like the hardware, the phone, its size. I like how polished it feels. I really like the photos it takes. But I consider Android's software to be superior. Others might disagree, but I have many reasons for why I prefer Android and I think iOS is falling further and further behind.
I am about to go read the article, but after owning a 6s+ for the past couple weeks, I will give a few impressions first:
* Very very very large (this is a big-ass phone),
* Very very very very fast,
* Some good options in the UI for heavier Mac style 'fuzzy' text,
* Battery life is barely dented after a typical day of surfing and texting occasionally at work,
* Phone is 'slippery' and I have to use a special grip, wrapping fingers around it to hold it securely,
* Camera is fantastic, with people asking me 'what lens' are you using, assuming I'm on my Nikon SLR,
* Fingerprint unlocking is here, and works perfectly.
All in all, it's an incredible leap from the iPhone 4S I had before. $900+ is a LOT for a phone though.
It's funny because despite most of this review going into very grimy detail about chipsets and transistor sizes and such (and other things which I honestly didn't understand) most of the comments are no different than what one would see on a less in-depth review from theverge, arstechnica or yahoo tech news.
I find it fascinating that Apple was able to get their process down to 14nm using the so called "3D process" up until now I really didn't understand why the qualcomm 810 was having so much trouble, now it makes a lot more sense.
How big of a difference is the camera on the 6s without OIS versus the 6s plus with OIS? I can't really notice a difference in the low light pictures on the site.
I take a lot of pictures, but I'm not someone who dives into the details (jpg is fine for me... never even considered RAW). I prefer the 6s form factor, but don't want to end up with a bunch of blurry pictures that would be clear if I would have gotten a 6s Plus.
Regarding battery life TSMC vs. Samsung chips, the link given in the other article (http://browser.primatelabs.com/battery3/search?dir=desc&page...) seems quite conclusive -- sorting by score, ratings in both 6s+ and 6s are clearly dominated by TSMC (motherboards without an "m").
This is of course as Apple states a fairly narrow and not necessarily representative test; but if I ever decide to upgrade from my 5s to 6s, I think I know which one I would want :)
Now, I'm not quite sure upgrade would be a good idea -- 5s seems snappy enough, and size does bother me quite a bit. On the other hand, I just noticed claims improved water resistance -- http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/02/iphone-6s-waterproof -- that make me seriously consider getting one...
Am I naive for thinking the iPhone cost less than $600? I don't know what I thought it might have cost, I've never been interested enough to go looking. I...just might have expected it to be less than the PC upgrades I occasionally fantasize about.
I'm a bit happier with the price/performance ratio of my much, much too old smartphone after seeing that price tag.
I love my iphone 6+, it's just too big for my hands. The double-swipedown on home button couldn't fully eliminate the need to use both hands in order to get to a screen spot. The regular 4.7" should be perfect.
[+] [-] jbk|10 years ago|reply
That's quite an endorsement, that is quite rare from Anandtech, if I've been following correctly.
I'm not always a huge fan of the iPhone, but I have to say that, after testing the 6S, it's really tempting.
[+] [-] glasshead969|10 years ago|reply
The last smartphone to get a similar endorsement was HTC One M7.
[+] [-] humbleMouse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamegoblin|10 years ago|reply
I know on the 6 you can double tap the home key to bring the screen down, but that is a bandaid. I also found the double tap unresponsive sometimes, often having to try two or three times, in which time I could have just repositioned my hand.
To me, the 5 is near the optimal smartphone size.
[+] [-] zephod|10 years ago|reply
What puzzles me is that I don't know anybody else who feels like this. Most people are surprised at me, or don't seem to notice that they suddenly need two hands to operate their smartphone.
[+] [-] ParadigmBlender|10 years ago|reply
I am also a tall guy with long fingers so usually I do not have to re-position the phone to reach everything. When I do, I can do it with one hand pretty smoothly now with a year of daily practice.
I do have to say, that any bigger and it would be too big. I can also see that someone who is less willing to compromise on drawbacks of a large screen would not like it.
[+] [-] jreed91|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nether|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MicroBerto|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vbezhenar|10 years ago|reply
If you have powerful computer from 2010, it'll happily run Windows 10 and almost any application, including almost any game in medium (or even high) mode. I wonder, whether this race on mobile platform will continue or iPhone 6S will be able to run iOS 15 without any lags?
On an unrelated note, I really don't understand, why iOS 9 (actually iOS 7+) is so slow on iPhone 4S. I was able to run powerful 3D games on that phone. Like a lot of shaders, triangles, special effects, and so on. This phone actually has good enough GPU. Why simple sliding animation could lag? Why opening "Settings" app takes few seconds? That's crazy. Probably there are good technical reasons for that, but I just don't understand, what they could be. Sometimes I think that there is intentional performance bottlenecks for old phones, so people would want to buy a new ones. I has the chance to compare iOS 6 and iOS 8/9 on the same phone, and difference is huge.
[+] [-] jackson1372|10 years ago|reply
I'm not sure the comparison to PCs is fair. Smartphones are still pretty young, and both the OS and chipsets make large leaps every year. If the pace of progress were as fast in the PC industry, you'd also expect a 5-year-old laptop to be unable to keep up.
I expect the pace of progress will slow down for smartphones. Consequently, the iPhone 6S will be usable for longer than the iPhone 4S.
[+] [-] jbandela1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyjones|10 years ago|reply
Perhaps it's the memory requirements. The 4S had 512MB RAM, the 6S has 2GB (plain 6/plus have 1GB).
[+] [-] alwillis|10 years ago|reply
The iPhone 4s used the A5, an 800 mhz 32-bit processor with 512MB of RAM.
From the review, the iPhone 6s is a 64-bit processor with access to 2GB of RAM. And with the advancements announced at WWDC like App Thinning and LLVM and Swift optimizations, we may be close to the end of seeing any noticeable slowdown in the foreseeable future of these devices.
[+] [-] tmalsburg2|10 years ago|reply
This bothers me a lot, and cynical as I am I suspect that this is on purpose and Apple's way to encourage people to upgrade to a new phone. My wife has a four years old MacBook Pro, which after two years inexplicably started to slow down more and more to the point where the most trivial tasks like opening a menu became a major pain. It is very hard to imagine legitimate reasons for why this should happen, especially since my wife installed a bunch of programs when the computer was new and since then did not change anything.
[+] [-] lgieron|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Theodores|10 years ago|reply
Maybe when iOS 15 comes along someone will put iOS 9 on it somehow and it will blaze along. I doubt it, but I would not be at all surprised if the delays in opening apps are the same in iOS 15 and the hardware that goes with it. There should be a 'Moore's Constant' for this, to describe how all advances in silicon are instantly negated by operating systems at boot time to have a consistent amount of delay when opening apps.
[+] [-] albertzeyer|10 years ago|reply
Also, the battery duration has become worse. But that might also just be its age - although not sure.
Now, just because of that, I'm thinking about buying a new phone.
I wonder, is this similar for Android phones? When I buy a high-end Android phone now, can I expect it to still run fast in 3-5 years or so the future current version of Android?
[+] [-] saturdaysaint|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|10 years ago|reply
But that's probably because the iPhone 4S has half as much RAM and a 0.3GHz slower CPU.
[+] [-] Bud|10 years ago|reply
The 4S is now 4 years old. That is a long time. The 4S is also 2 full years older than the first-ever 64-bit smartphone, the iPhone 5S, which really was a tremendous performance leap.
Try anything 5S or newer. You will be very happy.
[+] [-] gaius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devit|10 years ago|reply
A much safer bet would be a popular Android device, where anyone can port the latest Android version to the device and there is no monetary interest in not doing so, and thus it's likely that updates will be available forever.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|10 years ago|reply
I've felt ambivalent about 3d touch until now.
Now if I could get a dark UI theme on it my last gripe would go away. (No, negative is not good enough ;)
[+] [-] johns|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicholas73|10 years ago|reply
Such as, the Plus is a large phone so you most often open it with the phone tilted somehow, giving you landscape mode. It does not easily revert to the upright state without juggling it around, nor is there an option to not go landscape on the home screen only (seriously who needs that?). It's not even in the settings menu to disable rotation entirely - you have to find it in the pull up menu.
Another gripe I have is that all the pull up and down menus also trigger when you don't want it. The screen has gotten really sensitive, which is great, but there are lots of unintended effects now.
A fanatical user running the company wouldn't have overlooked this.
[+] [-] WildUtah|10 years ago|reply
I love this subtle invocation of the principle of 'this never would have happened if Steve Jobs were still alive.'
[+] [-] NamTaf|10 years ago|reply
There's also small things that seem unpolished to the traditional "Apple" level. For example even 2 years after the iOS7 release, the size of the status bar at the top changes between the lock screen and the homescreen, which means that not only does text size change but also the number of symbols that show up near the battery display changes too if you're right at the limit of real estate there. Yes, it's minor, but stuff like that didn't seem to happen several generations ago, but I'm noticing it more and more.
[+] [-] CamperBob2|10 years ago|reply
I'd like to grab the iPhone's product designer by his or her (designer) lapel and make one thing very clear: I should not have to look at my phone in order to turn it on, or to orient it for use.
This stuff should be obvious basic ergonomics, but ever since they released the infamous iPhone 4 with its perfectly symmetrical surfaces, they've always felt compelled to do at least one minor but annoying thing wrong. My previous iPhone 5 was a nice exception, but like its predecessors, it was just too small.
Gotta love all these First World problems, I suppose.
[+] [-] jharger|10 years ago|reply
The down side, of course, is that you lose some screen real-estate in your apps. They do need an option just for the home screen.
[+] [-] _ph_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrcwinn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jtsummers|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firloop|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_user|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watmough|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vxNsr|10 years ago|reply
I find it fascinating that Apple was able to get their process down to 14nm using the so called "3D process" up until now I really didn't understand why the qualcomm 810 was having so much trouble, now it makes a lot more sense.
[+] [-] kenjackson|10 years ago|reply
I take a lot of pictures, but I'm not someone who dives into the details (jpg is fine for me... never even considered RAW). I prefer the 6s form factor, but don't want to end up with a bunch of blurry pictures that would be clear if I would have gotten a 6s Plus.
[+] [-] xixi77|10 years ago|reply
This is of course as Apple states a fairly narrow and not necessarily representative test; but if I ever decide to upgrade from my 5s to 6s, I think I know which one I would want :)
Now, I'm not quite sure upgrade would be a good idea -- 5s seems snappy enough, and size does bother me quite a bit. On the other hand, I just noticed claims improved water resistance -- http://www.engadget.com/2015/10/02/iphone-6s-waterproof -- that make me seriously consider getting one...
[+] [-] oxide|10 years ago|reply
I'm a bit happier with the price/performance ratio of my much, much too old smartphone after seeing that price tag.
[+] [-] chenster|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jaimex2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madez|10 years ago|reply