The iPhone 6 Review
by Joshua Ho, Brandon Chester, Chris Heinonen & Ryan Smith on September 30, 2014 8:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone 6
A8’s CPU: What Comes After Cyclone?
Despite the importance of the CPU in Apple’s SoC designs, it continues to be surprising just how relatively little we know about their architectures even years after the fact. Even though the CPU was so important that Apple saw the need to create their own custom design, and then did two architectures in just the span of two years, they are not fond of talking about just what it is they have done with their architectures. This, unfortunately, is especially the case at the beginning of an SoC’s lifecycle, and for A8 it isn’t going to be any different.
Overall, from what we can tell the CPU in the A8 is not a significant departure from the CPU in A7, but that is not a bad thing. With Cyclone Apple hit on a very solid design: use a wide, high-IPC design with great latency in order to reach high performance levels at low clock speeds. By keeping the CPU wide and the clock speed low, Apple was able to hit their performance goals without having to push the envelope on power consumption, as lower clock speeds help keep CPU power use in check. It’s all very Intel Core-like, all things considered. Furthermore given the fact that Cyclone was a forward-looking design with ARMv8 AArch64 capabilities and already strong performance, Apple does not face the same pressure to overhaul their CPU architecture like other current ARMv7 CPU designers do.
Close Up: "Enhanced Cyclone"
As a result, from the information we have been able to dig up and the tests we have performed, the A8 CPU is not radically different from Cyclone. To be sure there are some differences that make it clear that this is not just a Cyclone running at slightly higher clock speeds, but we have not seen the same kind of immense overhaul that defined Swift and Cyclone.
Unfortunately Apple has tightened up on information leaks and unintentional publications more than ever with A8, so the amount of information coming out of Apple about this new core is very limited. In fact this time around we don’t even know the name of the CPU. For the time being we are calling it "Enhanced Cyclone" – it’s descriptive of the architecture – but we’re fairly certain that it does have a formal name within Apple to set it apart from Cyclone, a name we hope to discover sooner than later.
In any case one of the things we do know about Enhanced Cyclone is that unlike Apple’s GPU of choice for A8, Apple has seen a significant reduction in the die size of the CPU coming from the 28nm A7 to the 20nm A8. Chipworks’ estimates put the die size of Cyclone at 17.1mm2 versus 12.2mm2 for Enhanced Cyclone. On a relative basis this means that Enhanced Cyclone is 71% the size of Cyclone, which even after accounting for less-than-perfect area scaling still means that Enhanced Cyclone is a relatively bigger CPU composed of more transistors than Cyclone was. It is not dramatically bigger, but it’s bigger to such a degree that it’s clear that Apple has made further improvements over Cyclone.
The question of the moment is what Apple has put their additional transistors and die space to work on. Some of that is no doubt the memory interface, which as we’ve seen earlier L3 cache access times are nearly 20ns faster in our benchmarks. But if we dig deeper things start becoming very interesting.
| Apple Custom CPU Core Comparison | ||||||
| Apple A7 | Apple A8 | |||||
| CPU Codename | Cyclone | "Enhanced Cyclone" | ||||
| ARM ISA | ARMv8-A (32/64-bit) | ARMv8-A (32/64-bit) | ||||
| Issue Width | 6 micro-ops | 6 micro-ops | ||||
| Reorder Buffer Size | 192 micro-ops | 192 micro-ops? | ||||
| Branch Mispredict Penalty | 16 cycles (14 - 19) | 16 (14 - 19)? | ||||
| Integer ALUs | 4 | 4 | ||||
| Load/Store Units | 2 | 2 | ||||
| Addition (FP) Latency | 5 cycles | 4 cycles | ||||
| Multiplication (INT) Latency | 4 cycles | 3 cycles | ||||
| Branch Units | 2 | 2 | ||||
| Indirect Branch Units | 1 | 1 | ||||
| FP/NEON ALUs | 3 | 3 | ||||
| L1 Cache | 64KB I$ + 64KB D$ | 64KB I$ + 64KB D$ | ||||
| L2 Cache | 1MB | 1MB | ||||
| L3 Cache | 4MB | 4MB | ||||
First and foremost, in much of our testing Enhanced Cyclone performs very similarly to Cyclone. Accounting for the fact that A8 is clocked at 1.4GHz versus 1.3GHz for A7, in many low-level benchmarks the two perform as if they are the same processor. Based on this data it looks like the fundamentals of Cyclone have not been changed for Enhanced Cyclone. Enhanced Cyclone is still a very wide six micro-op architecture, and branch misprediction penalties are similar so that it’s likely we’re looking at the same pipeline length.
However from our low-level tests two specific features stand out: integer multiplication and floating point addition. When it comes to integer multiplication Cyclone had a single multiplication unit and it took four cycles to execute. However against Enhanced Cyclone those operations are now measuring in at three cycles to execute. But more surprising is the total Integer multiplication throughput rate; integer multiplication performance has now more than doubled. While this doesn’t give us enough data to completely draw out Enhanced Cyclone’s integer pathways, all of the data points to Enhanced Cyclone doubling up on its integer multiplication units, meaning Apple’s latest architecture now has two such units.
Meanwhile floating point addition shows similar benefits, though not as great as integer multiplication. Throughput is such that there appears to still be three FP ALUs, but like integer multiplication the instruction latency has been reduced. Apple has managed to shave off a cycle on FP addition, so it now completes in four cycles instead of five. Both of these improvements indicate that Enhanced Cyclone is not identical to Cyclone – the additional INT MUL unit in particular – making them very similar but still subtly different CPU architectures.
Apple iPhone Performance Estimates: Over The Years
Outside of these low-level operations, most other aspects of Enhanced Cyclone seem unchanged. L1 cache remains at 64KB I$ + 64KB D$ per CPU core, where it was most recently doubled for Cyclone. For L2 cache Chipworks believes that there may be separate L2 caches for each CPU core, and while L2 cache bandwidth is looking a little better on Enhanced Cyclone than on Cyclone, it’s not a “smoking gun” that would prove the presence of separate L2 caches. And of course, the L3 cache stands at 4MB, with the aforementioned improvements in latency that we’ve seen.
To borrow an Intel analogy once more, the layout and performance of Enhanced Cyclone relative to Cyclone is quite similar to Intel’s more recent ticks, where smaller feature improvements take place alongside a die shrink. In this case Apple has their die shrink to 20nm; meanwhile they have made some small tweaks to the architecture to improve performance across several scenarios. At the same time Apple has made a moderate bump in clock speed from 1.3GHz to 1.4GHz, but it’s nothing extreme. Ultimately while two CPU architectures does not constitute a pattern, if Apple were to implement tick-tock then this is roughly what it would look like.
Moving on, after completing our low-level tests we also wanted to spend some time comparing Enhanced Cyclone with its predecessor on some high level tests. The low-level tests can tell us if individual operations have been improved while high level tests can tell us something about what the performance impact will be in realistic workloads.
For our first high level benchmark we turn to SPECint2000. Developed by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, SPECint2000 is the integer component of their larger SPEC CPU2000 benchmark. Designed around the turn of the century, officially SPEC CPU2000 has been retired for PC processors, but with mobile processors roughly a decade behind their PC counterparts in performance, SPEC CPU2000 is currently a very good fit for the capabilities of Cyclone and Enhanced Cyclone.
SPECint2000 is composed of 12 benchmarks which are then used to compute a final peak score. Though in our case we’re more interested in the individual results.
| SPECint2000 - Estimated Scores | ||||||
| A8 | A7 | % Advantage | ||||
| 164.gzip |
842
|
757
|
11%
|
|||
| 175.vpr |
1228
|
1046
|
17%
|
|||
| 176.gcc |
1810
|
1466
|
23%
|
|||
| 181.mcf |
1420
|
915
|
55%
|
|||
| 186.crafty |
2021
|
1687
|
19%
|
|||
| 197.parser |
1129
|
947
|
19%
|
|||
| 252.eon |
1933
|
1641
|
17%
|
|||
| 253.perlbmk |
1666
|
1349
|
23%
|
|||
| 254.gap |
1821
|
1459
|
24%
|
|||
| 255.vortex |
1716
|
1431
|
19%
|
|||
| 256.bzip2 |
1234
|
1034
|
19%
|
|||
| 300.twolf |
1633
|
1473
|
10%
|
|||
Keeping in mind that A8 is clocked 100MHz (~7.7%) higher than A7, all of the SPECint2000 benchmarks show performance gains above and beyond the clock speed increase, indicating that every benchmark has benefited in some way. Of these benchmarks MCF, GCC, PerlBmk and GAP in particular show the greatest gains, at anywhere between 20% and 55%. Roughly speaking anything that is potentially branch-heavy sees some of the smallest gains while anything that plays into the multiplication changes benefits more.
MCF, a combinatorial optimization benchmark, ends up being the outlier here by far. Given that these are all integer benchmarks, it may very well be that MCF benefits from the integer multiplication improvements the most, as its performance comes very close to tracking the 2X increase in multiplication throughput. This also bodes well for any other kind of work that is similarly bounded by integer multiplication performance, though such workloads are not particularly common in the real world of smartphone use.
Our other set of comparison benchmarks comes from Geekbench 3. Unlike SPECint2000, Geekbench 3 is a mix of integer and floating point workloads, so it will give us a second set of eyes on the integer results along with a take on floating point improvements.
| Geekbench 3 - Integer Performance | ||||||
| A8 | A7 | % Advantage | ||||
| AES ST |
992.2 MB/s
|
846.8 MB/s
|
17%
|
|||
| AES MT |
1.93 GB/s
|
1.64 GB/s
|
17%
|
|||
| Twofish ST |
58.8 MB/s
|
55.6 MB/s
|
5%
|
|||
| Twofish MT |
116.8 MB/s
|
110.0 MB/s
|
6%
|
|||
| SHA1 ST |
495.1 MB/s
|
474.8 MB/s
|
4%
|
|||
| SHA1 MT |
975.8 MB/s
|
937 MB/s
|
4%
|
|||
| SHA2 ST |
109.9 MB/s
|
102.2 MB/s
|
7%
|
|||
| SHA2 MT |
219.4 MB/
|
204.4 MB/s
|
7%
|
|||
| BZip2Comp ST |
5.24 MB/s
|
4.53 MB/s
|
15%
|
|||
| BZip2Comp MT |
10.3 MB/s
|
8.82 MB/s
|
16%
|
|||
| Bzip2Decomp ST |
8.4 MB/
|
7.6 MB/s
|
10%
|
|||
| Bzip2Decomp MT |
16.5 MB/s
|
15 MB/s
|
10%
|
|||
| JPG Comp ST |
19 MP/s
|
16.8 MPs
|
13%
|
|||
| JPG Comp MT |
37.6 MP/s
|
33.3 MP/s
|
12%
|
|||
| JPG Decomp ST |
45.9 MP/s
|
39 MP/s
|
17%
|
|||
| JPG Decomp MT |
89.3 MP/s
|
77.1 MP/s
|
15%
|
|||
| PNG Comp ST |
1.26 MP/s
|
1.14 MP/s
|
10%
|
|||
| PNG Comp MT |
2.51 MP/s
|
2.26 MP/s
|
11%
|
|||
| PNG Decomp ST |
17.4 MP/s
|
15.1 MP/s
|
15%
|
|||
| PNG Decomp MT |
34.3 MPs
|
29.6 MP/s
|
15%
|
|||
| Sobel ST |
71.7 MP/s
|
58.1 MP/s
|
23%
|
|||
| Sobel MT |
137.1 MP/s
|
112.4 MP/s
|
21%
|
|||
| Lua ST |
1.64 MB/s
|
1.34 MB/s
|
22%
|
|||
| Lua MT |
3.22 MB/s
|
2.64 MB/s
|
21%
|
|||
| Dijkstra ST |
5.57 Mpairs/s
|
4.04 Mpairs/s
|
37%
|
|||
| Dijkstra MT |
9.43 Mpairs/s
|
7.26 Mpairs/s
|
29%
|
|||
Geekbench’s integer results are overall a bit more muted than SPECint2000’s, but there are still some definite high points and low points among these benchmarks. Crypto performance is among the lesser gains, while Sobel and Dijkstra are among the largest at 21% and 37% respectively. Interestingly in the case of Dijkstra, this does make up for the earlier performance loss Cyclone saw on this benchmark in the move to 64-bit.
| Geekbench 3 - Floating Point Performance | ||||||
| A8 | A7 | % Advantage | ||||
| BlackScholes ST |
7.85 Mnodes/s
|
5.89 Mnodes/s
|
33%
|
|||
| BlackScholes MT |
15.5 Mnodes/s
|
11.8 Mnodes/s
|
31%
|
|||
| Mandelbrot ST |
1.18 GFLOPS
|
929.4 MFLOPS
|
26%
|
|||
| Mandelbrot MT |
2.34 GFLOPS
|
1.85 GFLOPS
|
26%
|
|||
| Sharpen Filter ST |
981.7 MFLOPS
|
854 MFLOPS
|
14%
|
|||
| Sharpen Filter MT |
1.94 MFLOPS
|
1.7 GFLOPS
|
14%
|
|||
| Blur Filter ST |
1.41 GFLOPS
|
1.26 GFLOPS
|
11%
|
|||
| Blur Filter MT |
2.78 GFLOPS
|
2.49 GFLOPS
|
11%
|
|||
| SGEMM ST |
3.83 GFLOPS
|
3.44 GFLOPS
|
11%
|
|||
| SGEMM MT |
7.48 GFLOPS
|
6.4 GFLOPS
|
16%
|
|||
| DGEMM ST |
1.87 GFLOPS
|
1.68 GFLOPS
|
11%
|
|||
| DGEMM MT |
3.61 GFLOPS
|
3.14 GFLOPS
|
14%
|
|||
| SFFT ST |
1.77 GFLOPS
|
1.59 GFLOPS
|
11%
|
|||
| SFFT MT |
3.47 GFLOPS
|
3.18 GFLOPS
|
9%
|
|||
| DFFT ST |
1.68 GFLOPS
|
1.47 GFLOPS
|
14%
|
|||
| DFFT MT |
3.29 GFLOPS
|
2.93 GFLOPS
|
12%
|
|||
| N-Body ST |
735.8 Kpairs/s
|
587.8 Kpairs/s
|
25%
|
|||
| N-Body MT |
1.46 Mpairs/s
|
1.17 Mpairs/s
|
24%
|
|||
| Ray Trace ST |
2.76 MP/s
|
2.23 MP/s
|
23%
|
|||
| Ray Trace MT |
5.45 MP/s
|
4.49 MP/s
|
21%
|
|||
While the low-level floating point tests we ran earlier didn’t show as significant a change in the floating point performance of the architecture as it did the integer, our high level benchmarks show that floating point tests are actually faring rather well. Which goes to show that not everything can be captured in low level testing, especially less tangible aspects such as instruction windows. More importantly though this shows that Enhanced Cyclone’s performance gains aren’t just limited to integer workloads but cover floating point as well.
Overall, even without a radical change in architecture, thanks to a combination of clock speed increases, architectural optimizations, and memory latency improvements, Enhanced Cyclone as present in the A8 SoC is looking like a solid step up in performance from Cyclone and the A7. Over the next year Apple is going to face the first real competition in the ARMv8 64-bit space from Cortex-A57 and other high performance designs, and while it’s far too early to guess how those will compare, at the very least we can say that Apple will be going in with a strong hand. More excitingly, most of these performance improvements build upon Apple’s already strong single-threaded IPC, which means that in those stubborn workloads that don’t benefit from multi-core scaling Apple is looking very good.
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dingodingaling - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
1. Is there circumstantial evidence to suggest that AnandTech are Apple Stooges?Yes, absolutely. The founder and owner of the site works for Apple and so does one of their long term “reporters”.
2. Were AnandTech motivated to be Apple Stooges?
Yes, absolutely.
AnandTech are a commercial website, funded by advertising dollars. It is in their interests to drive up traffic and views of their site.
They know that:
a. iPhone users trawl every site that says anything in advance of an iPhone launch to pick up rumours, and after the launch to view “reviews” that help them avoid cognitive dissonance.
b. Apple punish negative reviews by withdrawing access to review devices and invitations to events. http://www.cultofmac.com/255618/how-apples-blackli...
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/apple-prs-dirty-li...
c. Being punished like this will impact them severely from a commercial perspective. They are therefore commercially incentivised to have positive reviews.
3. What means could they use to be Apple Stooges?
Given we know they are motivated and incentivised to give Apple products good reviews, we can analyse how they do it. This can be in 5 basic ways:
a. Use the Apple provided product, not one they brought off the shelf, meaning Apple can tune that one device for tests;
b. Cherry pick tests where the Apple product will do well, and ignore those that they don’t;
c. Carefully select the “comparison” devices, ignoring any that make Apple devices look bad;
d. Make up tests where they think they need to cover up a hole, but ensure that no one else knows how the test works so they can’t repeat it, and
e. Make “mistakes” occasionally and assume no one will notice.
4. Is there evidence to suggest they are using these methods?
a. Use the Apple provided product, not one brought from a store randomly.
Yes we know they do this, and they admit it. Also looking at the Display tests there is evidence to suggest that the Apple provided product was tuned. They themselves had to admit their suspicions.
b. Cherry picking tests.
Yes, they do this.
3DMark Ice Storm
“On the synthetic benchmark 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited, the iPhone 6 Plus scored 16,965. While that's well above the category average of 13,401, it fell below its Android competition. The S5 blew past with a score of 18,204, as did the HTC One M8 (20,640), the LG G3 (17,548), the OnePlus One (18,399) and the Note 3 (18,321)”
http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/smartphones/apple...
CNet finds similar results
<image001.jpg>
http://www.cnet.com/products/apple-iphone-6/
An example from Arstechnica
<image002.png>
More results at:
http://results.rightware.com/basemark_x/all-all-ph...
The Stooges select some of their tests (“Basemark X) but not others – why is that??
c. Carefully select the “comparison” devices, ignoring any that make Apple devices look bad;
Yes, they do this.
For the display, the comparisons for max brightness is missing phones for example the Note III which Tom’s hardware measure at 555 Nits. Why the missing phones?? Surely the Stooges have tested these.
One of the missing phones is the Note IV which displaymate tested and rated as the best Smartphone display – and their testing includes both iBends.
“The Best Performing Smartphone or Phablet Display that we have ever tested.”
http://www.displaymate.com/Galaxy_Note4_ShootOut_1...
http://www.displaymate.com/Galaxy_Note4_ShootOut_1...
Suspicious that its missing!
For contrast where are phones like the Galaxy S5? This comparison shows that the S5 has amazing contrast.http://www.phonearena.com/reviews/Apple-iPhone-6-v...
d. Make up tests where they think they need to cover up a hole, but ensure that no one else knows how the test works so they can’t repeat it
Yes, they do this.
For battery Life their test is simply wacko – the only site that has the iBends winning battery life tests and probably due to the rigged nature of the “web browsing” test.
http://gfxbench.com/result.jsp?benchmark=gfx30&...
Tom’s hardware has also has completely different results to the Stooges for battery life and web-browsing http://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-6-battery-life,...
Phonearena also have ‘web browsing’ tests that show the iBends aren’t great
http://www.phonearena.com/news/All-bow-to-the-new-...
Arstechnica also found the Ibend battery life to be average.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/iphone-6-and-...
e. Make “mistakes” occasionally and assume no one will notice.
Yes, they do this.
Sunspider
The iBend6+ has better measurements than on Tom’s Hardware.
Geekbench 3
The iBend6+ has worse scores on Tom’s hardware than the Galaxy S5 and Note III.
GFXBench 3.0 Manhatten Offscreen
Stooges are rating the IBend6 and iBend6+ higher than GFXBench themselves have tested it at.
http://gfxbench.com/result.jsp
http://laptopmag.com/reviews/smartphones/apple-iph...
The measurement for the iBend6+ is different on Tom’s hardware (its better!), but also different for all the other phones.
More “mistakes” for the colour temperature and gray scale accuracy are completely different in that test as well.
.http://www.phonearena.com/reviews/Apple-iPhone-6-v...
vFunct - Thursday, October 2, 2014 - link
Give it up.Your Android phones area garbage. They're fake iPhones. Apple invented the modern smartphone, and all the innovations like Retina displays. Android keeps trying to copy Apple, but they're never as good or as fast.
Why get a fake iPhone when you can get a real iPhone instead?
Fake iPhones are terrible. Get a real iPhone instead.
KuyaMarkEduard - Sunday, October 5, 2014 - link
Hello Dingodingaling. Are you certain that this practice of Apple is still existing even today, as we speak?""Apple PR's dirty little secret:
Summary: Apple PR maintains a blacklist of journalists that it refuses to talk to. This includes any media outlet that posts anything even remotely negative or heaven help you, a rumor.
Apple's public relations department is notoriously tight-lipped and only responds to a limited subset of the mainstream media, and usually only the outlets that write positive things about its products.
If you dare to write an unflattering piece about Apple or -- heaven forbid -- post a rumor you're almost guaranteed to lose your access to Apple. I know this firsthand because I'm the poster child of Apple's PR blacklist. (I was part of a precedent-setting legal case with Apple in 2005, which I won on appeal in 2007 -- thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.)
Say what you will about my work, but I call 'em like I see 'em.
I write good things about Apple, I write bad things about Apple and I also publish rumors when I believe that they're credible or plausible. I write about things that I find interesting and about topics that will benefit my readers. Sometimes Apple likes what I write other times it doesn't. Apple and I have classic love/hate relationship.
But one thing's for sure, I'm not an Apple cheerleader. If like reading puff pieces about Apple there are a number of websites and blogs that will gladly oblige. Or heck, just dial up apple.com/pr.
Case in point: On February 7 when Arun Thampi posted on his blog that Path was sneakily uploading iPhone user's address books to its server -- without permission -- I called and emailed Apple. Apple didn't reply. Then and I blogged about it.
On February 8 when Dustin Curtis blogged that Apple makes a standard practice of approving apps that upload the entire contents of your iOS address book to developer’s servers I again called and emailed Apple. Apple didn't reply. Then I blogged about it.
Later. Rinse. Repeat.
Then I got an idea. Since Apple PR never responds to my voicemails or emails, maybe they'd respond to the guys that do have access. So I contacted several prominent Apple pundits (who shall remain nameless) that are known for their access to Apple (some of whom get replies from Apple "every time") and I asked them to enquire about Apple's stance on enforcing its policy on address book uploads.
And you know what? None of them would do it.
(Update: ironically there's a couple of exclusive stories out today about Mac OS 10.8/Mountain Lion which certain members of the Mac Illuminati had access to a week early.)
Why? They'd probably say that Apple wouldn't comment. But someone's got to ask if they expect Apple to reply. I mean come on! Apple's not going to press release its shady developers that steal your contacts.
The fact of the matter is that most journos with access to Apple are afraid of losing it. They're afraid of asking the tough questions. They're afraid of getting blacklisted. Like me.
So then I contacted the Wall Street Journal.
There's a prominent columnist at WSJ that has lots of access to Apple. Arguably the most access to Apple. Apple loves the Journal. Apple sends controlled leaks to the Journal. Apple gives unreleased product to the Journal. Surely, Apple would have to respond to the Journal. Right?
Well guess what? Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr replied to AllThings today about the issue of developers stealing your contacts without permission. (More on that later)
Gee? I wonder why?
I'll tell you: AllThingsD is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company Inc., which is a member of The Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network (which includes WSJ.com, MarketWatch, Barron's, and SmartMoney).
It's simple really. Apple needs the Journal. The Journal doesn't need Apple. And the Journal's not afraid of getting on Apple's PR blacklist -- because it would never happen.
Other wags with access, but without the clout of the Journal are probably afraid of getting blacklisted if they probe around too much -- or ask the tough questions.
My point is that if Apple PR actually read blogs and responded to queries from bloggers things like Address-gate might not explode into giant issues that end up in the Wall Street Journal. Apple could have nipped it in the bud a week sooner by simply replying to my email or voicemail with something to the effect of "yes, we're aware of the issue and we're looking into it."
Instead, Apple makes a conscious point of ignoring certain journalists hoping that unsavory issues like Address-gate blow over and that no one will notice. Well guess what, I'm persistent. And if Apple doesn't reply, I'll contact the people that I know at the Journal -- or my Congressman.
And before you cry "sour grapes!" consider this. I've been blacklisted by Apple for over 10 years. I never get invited, I never get replies. I'm long over it. This doesn't have anything to do with me. It's about you and your privacy. I called and emailed Apple PR because I care about my (and your) private contacts and I wanted to know why Apple isn't enforcing its own privacy policies.
If you don't care about developers stealing your contacts, that's fine. But I do.""
Because if so, with the iBend issue, how can now then we be assured that each and every-time Apple will say a thing about the issue, will always be true, and not fabricated?
This is indeed, an eye-opener to all the Serious tech-readers out-there…, …Of-course, this does-not include the Fanboys.
EricGee - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link
If both new iPhone editions are virtually the same phone, why doesn't the 6 also have landscape view. Both these devices should have an iPad GUI. Landscape view is the most ergonomic position. Having to switch grips from portrait to landscape increases the chance for accidental drops. Landscape also decreases the likelihood for cumulative trauma which include carpal tunnel and digititis. In short, it's just easier to navigate your phone seamlessly by keeping it in your preferred orientation. Lastly, it's sad that I'm waiting for a jailbreak. My plan is not to jailbreak. But if Apple developers can't be aware to what the mass looks for in functionality, jailbreaking may be the only answer. If you would reference Infinidock, this app allows for multiple icons to be docked. Not just four icons. Making these small additions to the user interface would vastly improve the users experience. If developers aren't willing to make such adjustments, then I suggest allowing open code for Cydia jailbreak developers that will allow for users to freely mod our devices.Believe it or not, the ability to freely mod our phones to the users preference is what separates the iPhone and Android users. Hence the jailbreak... Don't patronize your loyal consumers by making such availability this coming S model.
James Wimberley - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link
Anand team: Please consider adding ruggedness tests for mobile devices. Desktops spend their lives in sheltered environments, with a few heatwaves and power cuts and surges. Laptops are occasionally dropped. But tablets and smartphones are constantly being dropped, put in linty pockets, exposed to rain and coffee, bent, scratched, and connected to low-quality chargers. If you a ea SEAL, you need a different order of ruggedness, like the Toughbook. But normal consumer use is still quite deamnding.e34v8 - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link
I have three main complains here.The is the screen resolution. We all know 326 ppi is far, far from enough. I have always been able to see aliasing on iPhone screens (never on my Nexus 5) and aside form that, the image is just not that clear and sharp as on a good 1080p screen. Maybe the 6+ will offer great viewing experience.
The second complain is size. Yes, I think that Apple is making the right move with bigger screen size. Better late than never. The 4.7" are not the ideal size for me, but this is a major improvement. But wtf were Apple thinking, when they made a 4.7" phone, with the dimensions of a 5 or a 5.2"phone? Why? Apple customers value compactness. Just compare it with an old 4.7" phone like the Optimus G - 131.9mm vs 138.1mm .
And last, but not least - 1gb of ram. Are Apple so greedy? This is typical planned obsolescence. I still can't believe it. 64 bit SoC and a gig of ram...
The lack of OIS or wireless charging is also not good.
This phone should cost a lot less.
blackcrayon - Friday, October 3, 2014 - link
"We all know 326 ppi is far, far from enough" - Stopped reading there. It's enough for the vast majority of people, and is certainly a better idea than making a 500 ppi phone that lags.e34v8 - Saturday, October 4, 2014 - link
Well, that's your problem. You should read someone's comment, before you reply.I agree with you. I also hate phones that lag, stutter or miss frames in the UI. That is the reason I do not like Samsung and their Touch Wiz. But that's not the case with my Nexus 5. It's totally stock, but believe me, it's blazing fast and smooth. And it still manages to have a gorgeous 455 ppi screen.
Anyway, there is no such thing as a perfect phone, but Apple could have offered much more, having in mind that it's a flagship expensive device.
michael2k - Monday, October 6, 2014 - link
1) Your eyesight is superior, most aren't nearly as good as yours.2) The Optimus G is 8.45mm thick vs the 6.9mm of the iPhone 6
3) You talk about typical planned obsolescence, yet in the same breath rave about the Nexus 5. The Galaxy Nexus from 2011 won't see either the 2013 KitKat nor the 2014 Android L, whilst the 2011 iPhone 4S saw both the 2013 iOS 7 and the 2014 iOS 8. I would expect a 2014 iPhone 6 to see at least iOS 11, and still be usable! What do you think your 2013 Nexus 5 will see?
4) OIS isn't that important, especially when it already has one of the best cameras in the industry
5) This phone already sold out. Costing less is probably the last thing it needs. Ordered on Sept 20th and expect to see my phone in October 20th.
e34v8 - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
The fact that my eyesight is or isn't superior does not change the facts. Ignoring or denying something, without any arguments is not productive. You say that OIS is not important and that's it. Why? I can tell you, I'm never going to buy a phone without OIS again. It's much easier for me to catch perfectly focused shots and shoot steady videos.Anyway, everyone has their own view on things. I think Apple are capable of making a better phone - with thin bezels, full HD screen, more than 1 gig of ram, bigger battery... but they chose not to. I'm not some fanboy that will blindly ignore faults. The iPhone 4 was my last iPhone. I'll continue to wait for something from Apple that's worth the money.