The Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Review
by Ryan Smith & Joshua Ho on November 2, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- SoCs
- iPhone 6s
- iPhone 6s Plus
System Performance
One of the more popular and pervasive beliefs in this industry is that specs increasingly don’t matter. In a lot of ways, this review isn’t really the right place to address whether or not this matters, but the short answer is that things like SoC performance matter quite a bit. Outside of the display, the SoC and RF subsystems are one of the biggest power consumers in a phone today and unlike the display or RF systems the CPU and GPU can cause short spikes of enormous power consumption. At this point, we’ve seen SoCs this year that consume anywhere between 6 to over 12 watts when faced with a full load situation. The important part here is that when an SoC uses that much power, it needs to be delivering enough performance to justify the power consumption. In order to test aspects of the phone like the SoC we use our standard suite of benchmarks, which are designed to test various real-world scenarios to get an idea of what peak performance looks like.
In the standard web browser benchmarks, the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus are clearly in the lead. The difference in some cases is significant, but given that the benchmarks that we’re running here are all enormous optimization targets it's still a reasonable comparison point. In the interest of trying to avoid optimization targets I decided to look at some new JavaScript benchmarks that aren’t regularly used right now. One interesting benchmark is Ember Performance, which is a JavaScript app framework that is used in a number of popular websites and applications. This isn’t as popular as AngularJS at the moment, but in the absence of a good mobile benchmark EmberJS should be a reasonably good proxy.
In this benchmark, we can see that there’s a pretty enormous performance uplift that results when you compare the iPhone 6s' to anything else out there on the market. Weirdly enough, on average it looks like Samsung’s S-Browser ends up slower here than Chrome, but it’s likely that this is just because S-Browser is using an older build of Chromium which negates the advantages of platform-specific optimizations that Samsung is integrating into S-Browser.
Looking at Basemark OS II, once again Apple is basically taking the lead across the board. The differences aren’t necessarily as enormous as they are in single-threaded browser benchmarks, but the iPhone 6s’ retain a significant overall performance lead over the next best mobile devices.
Overall, in benchmarks where CPU performance is a significant influence the iPhone 6s is pretty much at the very top of the stack. Of course, Apple has also had about 6-8 months of time since the launch of SoCs like the Snapdragon 810 and Exynos 7420 so this is at least partially to be expected. The real surprise and/or disappointment would be if future Exynos and Snapdragon SoCs continue to lag behind the A9 in CPU performance.
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IanHagen - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
I read on my phone all the time. It's great to have my library in my pocket and being relieved of carrying heavy books wherever I go.Caliko - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
A higher resolution wouldn't make a difference(besides pleasing spec junkies).jospoortvliet - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Of course it would. Putting my HTC One m7 next to the latest iPhone shows the latter has simply less crisp text. The screen is awesome besides that but don't go and deny it has almost the same resolution as the cheap Moto G I bought for my wife... Just as it has taken Apple a long time to finally deliver a larger screen (though with a bang) and just as they keep sporting ridiculous bezels, the low resolution is both factual and a noticeable compromise. I suspect they just have a too rigid ecosystem of apps which is not build for responsive screen sizes, unlike Android.Of course it doesn't make the 6s any less amazing as a phone, it might not be the best on every aspect but it is very close and seems well deserving of the gold. Too bad it is an Apple product, closed off and locked down. The day I can just plug a normal USB cable in and it will present itself as a normal USB storage device to my OS (Linux), and I can replace all proprietary cloud services with my own, switch app store and use open source apps I might consider it. Until then - thanks but no thanks.
Caliko - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
You're so full of it. The resolution is beyond what your eyes can distinguish.I can't believe in 2015 I STILL have to explain this. Feels like 2006 again....
Alexey291 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Nope you're really really wrong. And yes in 2014 people even at apple realised that 330ppi is too little. They are just you know... Behind...lurker22 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Or, it could be that the phone is really the best right now... maybe if android manufacturers would agree to stop abandoning their devices they would get more "bests." Something I noticed about android people, you're constantly whining whenever someone says the iPhone is a fantastic device.I have a Nexus 7, its ok, but wow is it not smooth or easy to maintain...i ended up installing a task manager to just get web browser to be somewhat less jerky on large pages.
SaolDan - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Come on dude. I dislike apple a lot but that being said they have very good hardware. Software sucks and a iPads i don't see a use for iPads specially the "pro" version specially when u can get a surface pro 4 for the same price but again their SOC are really really fast. im sayting this as someone who looks down on iPhones and iPad. I can respect mac os but IOS is garbage. BTW my work and only phone is a company issued iphone 6 so im not just saying all this. SP4 FTW.ASEdouardD - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
I'd argue that since iOS 8, iOS is very close to Android in terms of functionality, and has the added value of a better App Store. To each his own of course, but I feel the gap between the two OS's is much smaller than it was before. Android's app store is better than it was, and you havec more functionality with iOS than before.SaolDan - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
I lost my faith in android since 4.4. 4.3 was great. My wife got a lumia 1520 and that thing is awesome. Ive seen a few universal apps and they look great in big and small devices. I think that microsoft continuum would be great if it had a x86 SOC inside. I used to own a lumia 635 and i miss it so much.zeeBomb - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Soon ill get my hands on one.