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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HotdogPercolator - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
All of your "needs" are mine as well and I do them on a Jailbroken iPhone. I'm sorry if you're not smart enough to look past obstacles, but everything Androids do the iPhone can do just as well. Stop holding yourself back from a great experience. Branch out!BabelHuber - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
How did you install rSAP-drivers on your iPhone? How did you unlock the bootloader? Can you install a different OS?Where do you put SD-cards in?
JLiRD808 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Wow...we're sorry if you think your jailbroken iphone can do what a rooted android can do. While you have access to some apps that allow some customization, Android has that AND allows the OS to be completely tweaked and even swapped out! And Google encourages it!Can you even customize your CPU speed? Oh wait! You can speed up your animations so it LOOKS LIKE your CPU is operating faster lol. Nice one :P
Not that it matters, 90% of iphone 6s buyers are doing the same thing they were doing on their iphone 4/5.....Instagram, Facebook, the occasional game or two. Things'll be a few milliseconds snappier, sure. They'll only use "Live Photos" once or twice since it takes up extra storage. I give Apple credit for getting average users to drop big dollars on premium devices--they're truly amazing sheep-herders, and getting richer by the minute.
zeeBomb - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Uh but you can change how it performs tho...blackcrayon - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
"Can you even customize your CPU speed?"LOL, so you can go from "slower than the best", to "even slower" to make up for the heat, battery life, and nosediving-performance-over-time compromises at the stock speed? Sounds really enviable!
tuxRoller - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
That doesn't take processor variation into account.If you can stably undervolt your processor, you only gain battery life. Likewise, if you can overclock it and keep the voltages in check you see battery gains from race to idle
mikhapop - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
yeah, a lot of us are tired of arguing apple fans, the iphone can't stand my needs (advanced or not).1- Install iTunes to connect my phone to pc
2- Very low RAM (stupid tabs refreshing)
3- Very low resolution screen
4- No stylus for taking notes (i have a note 4)
5- Can't tweak the system (playing with kernels to get better battery life or performance when needed)
6- Can't run advanced systems that i need them (a web development & linux specific systems)
the only thing i like about the latest iphones is the style (i like the way these phones look) but i think also the s6 edge is equally as good looking if not better.
JLiRD808 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
I think we're at "6 +" now supporting you lolblackcrayon - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
Congratulations for encapsulating your total lack of knowledge of technology in such a clear, concise paragraph. Extra "expert" points for "the RAM is very little"...Macman2288 - Monday, November 2, 2015 - link
"SoC benchmarks are all synthetic and dubious" - so how would you test performance? This site is a benchmark site, that is what they do. If you hate benchmarks maybe this site is not for you."camera resolution s fully ignored, motion blur (the biggest problem for users) has never been tested" - you must not have read the article, motion blurr, image resolution, and video quality were all explored and displayed fairly for the reader to see.
"LTE is just cat 6" - 8-/ i have no words
"And lets not forget signal strength , god forbid you would ever mention how terrible iPhones are there" - are you talking about the iPhone 4? iPhones have the same chips and antenna designs as most other smart phones and appear to perform as well as more android phones.
"15 years ago you would laugh at people like you, irrational and lazy as you got." - You just described yourself today.
Yes my name says it all, I do enjoy apple products, but if was going to bash an article I would try to be a little more convincing. I have seen way better arguments for not buying an iPhone then what you displayed.