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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StormyParis - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
I don't do 3D games, so I don't really care about gaming performance. I'll take a crisp display anytime.R. Hunt - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Same here. Besides, I think Samsung's displays are superior because of Amoled, not because of higher pixel density.MattL - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Though they are superior in both quality and higher pixel density. Don't get me wrong, iPhone uses the best of phone LCD screens, but they just can't top OLED screens and they haven't for the last couple generations.RealityMonster - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
The pixel density is an illusion--it's just killing your battery. At normal viewing distances, you can't see the pixels at all at iPhone resolutions. The numbers are nice and big for the newer displays, but they're super wasteful.KoolAidMan1 - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
But hey, who cares about practicality and real world returns when you have numbers on a specsheet to brag about, right?RealityMonster - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Probably more to the point, when you're racing to the bottom in price and trying to differentiate yourself from the Android phone next to you, if you don't have bigger numbers, nobody's going to care about you. Android phones are definitely less pricey, but there's a penalty to pay for that.FL777 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Hmmmm you are not corrrect. When you zoom in with the S6 or Note 5 it becomes relevant. Further every major professional reviewer has rated the S6 and Note 5 displays as the best. Displaymate, one of the most objective and respected display reviewers in the world, have rated the Note 5 display as the best display ever on a smartphone. The Samsung S6 is not far behind.Further, the Note 5 display doesn't sap the battery to the point that the phone will not perform. The Note 5 has one of the better battery lives in smartphones - so it is VERY practical. Further, Samsung will replace the battery for a whopping $45.00 when it wears out. In every way, Samsung is just becoming a better phone than Apple's iPhone.
blackcrayon - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Still it implies the display can't be properly driven by the underlying hardware, which is a travesty. It's another reason why the UI is never as smooth as it should be.FL777 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Damn you are just plain ignorant! You obviously don't own the S6 or the Note 5 or you would make such stupid, ignorant remarks. The Note 5 is several months old and it STILL competes with the iPhone 6S in most speed categories. The Nexus 6P actually beats the iPhone 6S in real world speed tests.I get that you don't like Android phones but at the very least you can read some reviews before you make such poorly educated, juvenile remarks.
FL777 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
You're right, the S6 display does tax the phone's battery, I own the S6 and I can attest to that. However, the Note 5 does much better on this issue and frankly kicks the iPhone's ass. Further, you are incorrect, both the Note 5 and S6 perform well in ed tests compared to the iPhone 6S.And yes, my comment still stands, the iPhone's display is embarrassing compared to Samsung's displays. Every professional reviewer on the planet confirms this including Displaymate - one of the most highly regarded display reviewers in the world.
In the end, Apple's iPhones are becoming less and less competitive with the new top tier Android phones in several important categories. Tim Cook, Apples radical homosexual CEO, is doing a terrible job running the company, despite Apples profits. Apple's profits are a result of Steve Job's genius and the iPhone was Job's creation.