Apple (AAPL) is not in the habit of releasing new iPhones that disappoint people. It’s had a few hiccups — like the iPhone 6 “bendgate” and the iPhone 4 antenna issue — but nothing that would prevent another year of record sales.
So what about the iPhone 6s?
The “s” years, an incremental upgrade falling on every other year, have always been a tad riskier for Apple. New features aside, having this year’s iPhone look exactly like last year’s has the potential to dissuade any conspicuous consumers from upgrading.
If Apple added the new Rose Gold color option and a compelling new feature in 3D Touch as part of an effort to avoid the issue, it succeeded. The iPhone 6s once again set a new launch weekend sales record.
Record sales aside, is Apple’s latest flagship smartphone worth dropping $649 or more for? Read our iPhone 6s review to find out.
iPhone 6s Review: Improving Some (But Not All) iPhone Pain Points
Last year, Apple addressed the biggest complaint about the iPhone by boosting the iPhone 6 display to 4.7-inches.
With this year’s iPhone 6s, the company began knocking off some of the others.
Bendgate should be history, thanks to the use of virtually unbendable 7000-series aluminum. The 8-megapixel camera has been bumped to 12-megapixel and gains 4K video capability. RAM has been doubled from 1GB to 2GB. The Touch ID sensor is more accurate and much faster.
However, battery life has often been a bone of contention with the iPhone, and this year Apple actually used a lower capacity battery than in the iPhone 6. Improved power efficiency is supposed to negate that change, but with many iPhone 6s reviews citing poor battery life as a concern, it certainly hasn’t improved any.
And while competing smartphones are increasingly moving to 32GB for their base model, the iPhone 6s stubbornly remains at 16GB — to move up a tier to a more reasonable amount of storage requires jumping to 64GB, boosting the price to $749.
iPhone 6s Review: Adding Exclusive Features
Everyone expects a new iPhone to be faster than before and the iPhone 6s doesn’t disappoint.
Apple says the new A9 CPU powering the iPhone 6s delivers up to 70% faster performance than last year’s A8, with up to 90% faster graphics performance. Add the extra RAM into the equation and you can have more apps open with less refreshing required.
Even though this is an “s” year, Apple added two new features that are exclusive to the iPhone 6s (and iPhone 6s Plus).
3D Touch is the iPhone implementation of the Force Touch technology used for the Apple Watch and new MacBooks. It relies on force-sensitive interaction to add new touch gestures like Peek and Pop, which open up new ways to interact with apps on the fly. It may sound gimmicky, but it changes the iPhone user experience for the better.
Then there’s Live Photos, which automatically captures a snippet of video when a photo is shot. When you look at the image later, it’s briefly animated. Think Harry Potter and you have an idea of what I mean.
Although Apple doesn’t promote this, a teardown of the iPhone 6s by iFixit discovered a gasket and silicon seals on key components that makes this smartphone far less vulnerable to accidental water damage than previous versions.
Oh, and Apple also added a new case color — Rose Gold, which is proving enormously popular among Chinese.
iPhone 6s Review: Conclusion
If you take platform preference out of the equation, there’s no disputing the fact that the iPhone 6s is an excellent smartphone in pretty much every way. When you compare specs, it’s definitely behind the Android competition.
- 4.7-inch Retina display (326 ppi) with 3D Touch
- 64-bit A9 chip with embedded M9 motion coprocessor and 2GB of RAM
- 16, 64 or 128GB of storage
- 12-megapixel iSight camera with 4K video and Live Photos
- 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi with MIMO
- Bluetooth 4.2, NFC
- 1715mAh battery rated at up to 14 hours talk time, up to 11 hours Internet use
- 5.44 x 2.64 x 0.28-inches, weighs 5.04 ounces
- Available in Gold, Silver, Space Gray and Rose Gold
- Runs iOS 9
- MSRP $649 (16GB) and up
Despite an upgrade, the camera is no longer the best in class, the 16GB entry model has too little storage for many users and the 326-ppi display is outclassed by the likes of Samsung’s (SSNLF) 577-ppi Galaxy S6. And, as many iPhone 6s reviews are reporting, battery life remains a weak point.
But specs aren’t everything.
As a complete package, Apple has produced another flagship smartphone that raises the bar in design quality and adds what could be a killer new feature in 3D Touch.
It’s unlikely that Apple will sway huge numbers of Android converts with the iPhone 6s — the release of Android Marshmallow and a flood of high quality, low-cost smartphone options for that camp makes for a tough sell — but new smartphone buyers will (rightly) look at this device as one of the best available.
Current iPhone 6 owners will have little reason to upgrade (unless they’re really stuck on that Rose Gold option or 3D Touch), but for anyone with an older Apple smartphone the iPhone 6s would make a worthy purchase.
As of this writing, Robert Martin did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
