The iPhone 5s Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 17, 2013 9:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone
- iPhone 5S
Battery Life
Brian did some excellent sleuthing and came across battery capacities for both the iPhone 5s and 5c in Apple’s FCC disclosures. The iPhone 5 had a 3.8V 5.45Wh battery, while the 5s boosts total capacity to 5.96Wh (an increase of 9.35%). The move to a 28nm process doesn’t come with all of the benefits of a full node shrink, and it’s likely not enough to completely offset the higher potential power draw of a much beefier SoC. Apple claims the same or better battery life on the 5s compared to the iPhone 5, in practice the answer is a bit more complicated.
Unlike previous designs, we’ve never had a half node shrink for an s-SKU. Both the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4S stayed on the same process node as their predecessor and drove up performance. In the case of the 3GS, the performance gains outweighed their power cost, while in the case of the iPhone 4S we generally saw a regression.
The iPhone 5s improves power consumption by going to 28nm, but turns that savings into increased performance. The SoC also delivers a wider dynamic range of performance than we’ve ever seen from an Apple device. There’s as much CPU power here as the first 11-inch MacBook Air, and more GPU power than an iPad 4.
To find out the balance of power savings vs. additional performance I turned to our current battery life test suite, which we first introduced with the iPhone 5 review last year.
We'll start with our WiFi battery life test. As always, we regularly load web pages at a fixed interval until the battery dies (all displays are calibrated to 200 nits).
The iPhone 5s regresses a bit compared to the 5 in this test (~12% reduction despite the larger battery). We're loading web pages very aggressively here, likely keeping the A7 cores running at their most power hungry state. Even the 5c sees a bit of a regression compared to the 5, which makes me wonder if we're seeing some of the effects of an early iOS 7 release here.
The story on LTE is a bit different. Here we see a slight improvement in battery life compared to the iPhone 5, although the larger battery of the 5s doesn't seem to give it anything other than parity with the 5c:
Our cellular talk time test is almost entirely display and SoC independent, turning it mostly into a battery capacity test:
You can see the close grouping of the smaller iPhones at the bottom of the chart. There's a definite improvement in call time compared to the iPhone 5. We're finally up above iPhone 4S levels there.
Our Egypt HD based 3D battery life test gives us the first indication that Rogue, at least running fairly light code, can be more power efficient than the outgoing 5XT. Obviously the G6430 implemented here can run at fairly high performance levels, so I'm fully expecting peak power consumption to be worse but for more normal workloads there's no regression at all - a very good sign.
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Bragabondio - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
Great review. Anand is an Apple fanboy (meaning he is an active user of mac, iphone and ipad) so he has bias towards the ecosystem but his reviews are top notch regardless of his personal preferences. Although I do not necessary always agree with him I respect his technical acumen and his desire to look deeper and discover things that most casual observers miss.I would like to see an update on :
a) GPS - how the navigation has improved (or not) in ios7 perhaps testing it head to head vs. Nexus 4 or 5 (in case he has a prototype) during a ride;
b) speaker quality - this is subjective but perhaps at least loudness and is it mono or stereo
c) phone calls quality - yes this depends on the carrier but again a subjective evaluation would be appreciated.
A few comments on the actual review.
graphic tests
I love to see improvements in the graphics quality of ARM devices although I practically do not play games on my phone. Hopefully, Apple's example will push the industry towards faster development.
Missing AC Wi-Fi is a bummer
Regarding future-proofing I disagree with Amand it is not the CPU or GPU but the 4 inch screen is too small for web reading and the trend towards larger devices will continue thus unless you really like the screen and OS (I bet when Iphone 6 is revealed with 4.5 inch screen Anand will say that yes, it is hard to go back to iphone 5 :)
WoodyPWX - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
For the web browsing battery life benchmark, it would be better to have also the number of reloads executed and the energy spent for one reload (computed from those two). There are two problems it could help solve. First, slow reloads caused by a slow connection most probably force CPU to sleep, so they actually save battery and favorize worse device. Second, faster CPU processes a web page much faster. It could draw more energy but for shorter time, so it would be a win in a normal situation. Unfortunately that's not the case in your benchmark, where another reload immediately follows. Energy spent on each reload could prove here on the 5s it will stay longer in real life situations and that's what I'm interested in.sfaerew - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
you are right!jeffkro - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Looks kind of like the HTC one.joshjw - Saturday, September 21, 2013 - link
Well i think what you are trying to say is that the HTC one looks a lot like the Iphone because the 5s looks identical to the 5 except for the home button and the 5 was released before the HTC 1tipoo - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
So what was up with the Infinity Blade 3 guys saying it loaded 5X faster on the 5S? How much faster is the NAND, exactly?Sabresiberian - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Apple, so far, has proved me wrong. I said they were going to be a cell phone dead end eventually a few years ago, but they have continued to innovate. The fact that they designed their own SoC has very much impressed me.I'm a PC guy, I'm a Windows guy; but I recognize a commitment to making a product better when I see one. Well done Apple!
If Microsoft wants to grab more smart phone market share, then they could do well to emulate Apple in this regard. Moral of the story here is - don't follow, lead!
slickr - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
Anand is a shill for the NSA, don't trust the retard. He is there to tell you to buy a spy system that scans your face, that scans your fingertip and has your full name and all other information.This is the NSA's dream, a spy device masquerading as phone that shills like Anand the retard push.
dugbug - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
Your tin foil budget must be quite largehulkkii - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
How fast is the camera compared to iPhone 5? (Can you test with CamSpeed)?