iPhone 6S, 6S Plus: Apple SHAFTS eager fans with STRAPPING VIBRATOR Apple's iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, lovingly crafted by Cupertino's chief designer Sir Jony Ive, have landed – and with them the first teardowns shedding light on what's packed under the hood. Dissections of both the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus have confirmed earlier speculation that Apple has indeed traded a smaller battery for more …
So 6S is faster and more efficient, which enabled them to reduce the battery and still claim battery life is no worse than the old phone?
And "no worse" is a feature they point out?
Geez guys, couldn't you at least left the battery the same size and made longer battery life a selling point?
I had a quiet week, which meant my iPhone 6 was just picking up email and staying online while travelling around. The battery lasted more than 48h - it was still at 29% when I plugged it in around the 50h mark, and that was with LTE enabled (I found, when abroad, that it greatly helps to limit connectivity to 3G, which is enough for me anyway).
The problem I think all manufacturers face - particularly at the power guzzling end of the market is that a few extra hours probably makes things worse.
Let's assume a handset (whatever it is) has enough grunt with normal use to get through the day to bedtime with 20-25% remaining - which seems to be the norm in the case of high end models). Does adding an extra 4 hours battery life add anything? No, not really because in the real world charging regimes are (I imagine) more or less tied to life patterns. I'm sure plenty here will say "not me" but in aggregate it feels right - put on charge, climb into bed.
So what we see is "Make it last just long enough with a bit of spare", which I imagine is the reason Apple have cut the size of the battery. Because adding the few hours that other efficiencies might bring doesn't actually improve the UX hugely.
Now offer me an extra *comfortable* 24 hours and i'm interested. But an extra 24 hours is much harder to achieve at marketable weights. Very desirable - but much harder. Hopefully it will come, but the steps seem to be to me:
18 hours (1 day's use)
42 hours (2)
66 hours (3)
and so on. Moving up that scale is an interesting challenge. How will it play out I wonder? Smaller and smaller batteries over time? Then a huge leap in say 5 yrs?
Very good point. The increase in battery life has to be on a scale (if one is going to make a marketing point of it) that it is actually noticed by the punter and perceived of as a genuine and useful increase. Otherwise the company concerned may risk a backlash from their customer base if the increase is in practice invisible to said customers. The practical reality is I suspect that there has to be something of a significant leap forward (as you outline) before the marketing department can start mouthing off raising the profile of the given device's battery life when designing their advertising campaign.
Assuming 20% remaining after a day's use when new, how long before degradation of the battery reduces that margin to 0%? How much does dissatisfaction with deterioating battery life reduce the average time between phone replacements?
Genuine questions, as I've never been a heavy user of smartphones, and never owned a high-end model like an iPhone.
My 6 Plus uses about 20% battery a day and can go a full work week without a recharge. Sure, my old 4 would be lucky to have 20% left at the end of the day but the 6 Plus has excellent battery life and if the 6S can do the same with less then all the better.
Personally, I'm not going to upgrade because the 6S isn't much different from my current phone and worse, the price went up by $350 here not that I replace my phone each year anyway - I buy outright and run for four years.
The problem I think all manufacturers face - particularly at the power guzzling end of the market is that a few extra hours probably makes things worse.
I would agree with you insofar that it will not help one jot with average use, but it's exactly the "average" that is the problem. As I posted above, I had a couple of quiet days and I easily got through two full days with one charge with an iPhone6 that is about 6 months old, so it's a battery that has seen some use. I have since observed the same with an iPad 3, so as far as I can tell, something has indeed changed with iOS 9.
The big "however" comes when that day is *not* quiet. If I spend the whole day on calls I rarely get to the end of the day with one charge - going on air full time simply costs energy and I don't think much has changed to that power demand, them Watts are still needed to get it to a cell tower.
I personally think that the midway point the manufacturers have chosen needs to be shifted so it add one or two hours. I don't consider myself an average user, but given that battery life is an oft quoted issue it suggests the use case considered "average" is not.
"lovingly crafted by Apple's chief designer Sir Jony Ive"
While I'm not trying to suggest Jony hasn't directed the creation of some magnificent products, I think you'll find its hundreds of unnamed minions who've "lovingly crafted" the Apple products.
The image of some old school British inventor with the rolled up sleeves, peaked eye-shade and magnifying lamp sitting in a dingy basement with just some tiny tools and a steaming cup of tea - nah!
I can't get my head around the fact that Apple only bother to install 2GB of RAM in their 'flagship' handsets, I thought 3GB was almost industry-accepted as the norm now for high-end handsets, but Apple are still only popping 2GB in?
I'm also looking at the specs side-by-side for the 6 Plus and the 6S Plus and failing massively to see any improvement other than the new A9 chip and a slightly better selfie cam, then again this is the 'S' so it's less of an upgrade than an entirely new model.
Both iOS and Winmob have reputations for being more memory efficient than Android
iOS I knew to be quite efficient, but Winmob as well? What happened? Did Microsoft outsource the development of that code? They have not been able to write efficient code for, well, for as long as they have been writing code.
Jokes aside about Microsoft and their bloatware, their phone OS seems to respond just as smooth (and that actually means nice, not crappy!) on their low end phones as their flagships. My 1020 has 2GB ram, which was pretty much standard flagship ram 2 years ago when they came out. This one only had more than required for the OS to deal with the fallout when you press the shutter button.
ISTR that 1 GB of that RAM is solely allocated to the camera for dealing with the huge image files it needs to work with.
I had a 920 and now a 1020 - they both work well with the 1GB I think they both use, they are almost the same is other respects.
Still, if the 950 is small enough with the bigger screen (and has wireless charging natch), then a replacement is probable in the next six months or so - I so badly wish they could accommodate the same or similar camera though, I will just hope the extra speed and facilities make up for the lost resolution.
The new phones have 2GB I think but they will run Win10 with continuum etc. so it is a different ball game from here on in.
I never looked at it closely, but iPhone apps are compiled from Objective-C to machine code. Whereas Android apps are mostly (with the exception of some parts from Google or hardware vendors) bytecode run by Dalvik, which is JVM and also runs garbage collection etc. , in other words they are less memory efficient. So, if you took one app and compiled it in Xamarin to iPhone and Android, the resulting binary would have most likely smaller memory footprint on iPhone, than on Android (when actually running). Which means that iPhone does not need as much memory to run apps fluidly, as Android does. It also does not provide the same level of isolation, but that's different matter.
The higher than expected repairability score for these new phones is most likely the need for Apple store "Geniusesses" to be able to swap in a replacement screen as quickly as possible, I think you can get a new Apple screen fitted instore on your iPhone 6 for around £95, not cheap, but it will keep the warranty on your phone and the repair should take a maximum of 30 minutes.
Of course if Apple could actually create a phone that did not crack the screen when dropped that would be nice, but it has to be thin and svelte, got to keep up that design aesthetic and the markup on the repairs is also a nice little bonus for the stores.
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