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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blackcrayon - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C . ClarkeTalk about fake outrage over nothing.
Bhairava - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
I'm not an Android fan, but you sirs are certainly Apple fanboys, or fashion victims. Iphone 6s is certainly an extremely good device, but this review is beyond any reasonable doubt driven by Apple itself. If you are not aware of this, if you don't notice it, you should be asking some questions on your lucidity and objectivity. There is a reason why the founder of Anandtech has been hired by Apple.dangerzone - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
And there is also a reason why the founder of Anandtech no longer writes for this website... because he started working for Apple. Take off your tinfoil hat.Bhairava - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
I'm not an Android fan, but you sirs are certainly Apple fanboys, or fashion victims. Iphone 6s is certainly an extremely good device, but this review is beyond any reasonable doubt driven by Apple itself. If you are not aware of this, if you don't notice it, you should be asking some questions on your lucidity and objectivity. There is a reason why the founder of Anandtech has been hired by Apple.blackcrayon - Wednesday, November 4, 2015 - link
Facts have a pro-Apple bias, eh?Despoiler - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
And yet another cell phone review with no consideration to audio. A lot of people use their phones to listen to music, use speakerphone for conference calls, and record video @ concerts. While your reviews are excellent in all other areas, you are missing a huge chunk of necessary testing and analysis.Jumangi - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Your looking at other things besides the phone itself. Most people are going to use headphones which is beyond the phone itself, and audio quality is also dependent on cell signal quality.Despoiler - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Untrue. The audio quality the phone output's is measurable as well as the voltage it outputs to map to an acceptable impedance range of the headphones you can use. Do you honestly think that everyone uses crappy Apple earbuds or Beats headphones with their phone? Also, speaker quality and loudness is a quality of the phone not beyond the phone. How good a phone handles high SPL sound recording is as important as low SPL.mashuri - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
Ken Rockwell did extensive audio tests with the iPhone 6 Plus (last year's model). Hint: The audio quality is among the best. http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/iphone-6-plus.htmDespoiler - Tuesday, November 3, 2015 - link
I've actually read that the 6s has some audio issues. Hissing/buzzing. What was good before doesn't appear to be solid across the board with this iteration.