Ah the iPhone 6s. Whether Apple's S lineup of devices come with design overhauls or not, one thing's for sure. They come with their fair share of upgrades, and the changes Apple introduces are related more towards performance and feature enhancements, rather than overall design. While the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus came with increased screen sizes and some new features, the iPhone 6s duo was the one that saw several completely new features being introduced to the mix.
Today we have veteran Apple journalist John Gruber's take on the whole thing. Gruber's been reviewing the iPhone 6s for a couple of days, and he's even run some benchmarks, that manage to showcase some very impressive performance details for the devices.
The Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Outperform The MacBook In Benchmarks
Before we get into the technical and performance related details of Apple's 2015 flagships, lets first take a look at what Gruber has to say on the matter. He's received 128 GB variants of the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus for testing, and according to him, you've been looking at the S lineup of Apple's iPhones completely wrong. The S lineup is the one which has been the most innovative since the iPhone 3GS and Apple's always pushed its generation to the limit before introducing its successor.
The iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus are completely new devices even though they may appear identical to the iPhone 6 duo. They've been manufactured with 7000 series Aluminum, which according to Gruber requires new tools to manufacturer and assemble. The display of this year's iPhones is also made up of an entirely new glass and this coupled with new 3D Touch sensors make the phones purely different devices. Apple's tradition of keeping device design similar for two years gives the company plenty of time to improve core performance details.
In fact, its been the company's S lineup of devices which have seen the most 'innovative' changes from Apple to date. The iPhone 3GS came with performance and camera enhancements, the iPhone 4s introduced Siri and the iPhone 5s came with a 64 bit mobile processor and Touch ID - both of which have been adopted by the nearly the entire top-end smartphone market as of now. Apple's reserved display upgrades for generational iPhone upgrades however, and perhaps this is the reason we didn't see any resolution changes on the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus. Something, after all has to be saved for next year.
Moving towards Gruber's performance benchmarks, looks like Apple's put quite a lot of time and effort into designing its A9 SoC for the iPhone 6s duo. While the iPhone 6's A8 saw a rather reasonable upgrade over the A7's performance scores, the Apple A9 nearly doubles its predecessor's performance scores. According to these figures, which you can take a look at below, perhaps Apple really wasn't overstating things when it claimed that the A9 offers up to 70% improved CPU performance.
The scores for the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6s duo are displayed under the same category as there's no significant difference between them. As you can see, in both single and multi-core scores, the iPhone 6s manages to achieve 1.6 and 1.5 times the scores of its predecessor. We're eagerly waiting for the iPhone 6s duo to hit the shelves so that we can take a better look at what the A9 offers under the hood. 14/16nm FinFET must bring its fair share of upgrades to Apple's flagship smartphones after all.
The company has proven its prowess in hardware manufacturing as well, which hit its peak at the launch of the iPad Air 2 last year. The iPad came with the A8X on board, Apple's tri-core Cyclone processor that was meant to be a formidable competitor to Nvidia's Tegra K1, a beast of a processor that brings desktop grade graphics processing to mobile devices. When you compare Apple's A9 to the 11 inch MacBook, Cupertino's smartphone manages to overtake the 12 inch Retina MacBook launched earlier this year.
In single core GeekBench scores, the iPhone 6s outperforms the MacBook by 205 points. In multi core, the difference between the two isn't that very much significant, with the MacBook topping out the iPhone 6s by a little more than a 100 points. Apple's managed to match Intel's Core M in terms of benchmark scores which indicates a good direction for the company to be heading into. We're very eager to dive into the technical details of the Apple A9 and take a look at what changes Cupertino's made under the hood.
Speaking of eagerness, the A9 wasn't the only processor that Apple showcased this year. The iPad Pro comes with the A9X on board, which should prove to be an interesting processor in itself. Given the above par enhancements of the A9 and the unique design of the A8X, the A9X should prove to be the best of both worlds. The next Apple SoC, the Apple A10 has also been rumored to involve Intel in its manufacturing, and should Apple develop this aspect even more, then there's no where but the top for the iPhone. That ends our coverage of Apple's iPhone 6s performance. Stay tuned and let us know what you think in the comments section below.
