Tech

Hands-on with the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, and why the 16GB model needs to die

There are few surprises in this year’s low-key iPhone refresh.

Andrew Cunningham – Sep 9, 2015 8:20 pm | 206

Looking at the detail in a 4K video. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone accounts for something like two-thirds of Apple’s revenue, but you wouldn’t know it from the way Apple introduced the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus at its product event today. The phones were fourth on a long list of announcements, after new Apple Watch colors and bands, the iPad Pro, and the new Apple TV and tvOS.

The 6S and 6S Plus (hereafter simply the “6Ses”) build on the foundation laid by the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but no matter how interesting the internal changes are they can’t really replicate the usefulness and obviousness of bigger screens. Apple is going to sell a lot of these phones, but it’s fitting that they had such a low-key introduction—they’re mostly subtle improvements, welcome but not really mind-blowing.

The S is for Subtle

To start, a list of the important year-to-year changes:

“3D Touch” pressure sensitivity that’s a lot like what you get in the Apple Watch.
More durable 7000-series aluminum.
A new “rose gold” color option, which is more or less just pink.
A 12MP camera that can shoot 4K video at 30 FPS.
A 5MP FaceTime camera that can use the entire screen as a flash.
A new A9 chip with improved CPU and GPU performance.
Faster Wi-Fi and LTE.
Always on, voice-activated Siri.

An examination of things like camera quality and SoC speed will have to wait for our full review, so here we’ll just focus on the things we could try in our brief hands-on session after Apple’s event.

First, the 7000-series aluminum may make the phones sturdier, but they’re also noticeably heavier than the 6 and 6 Plus. The 6 and 6 Plus were 0.27 and 0.28 inches thick and weighed 4.55 and 6.07 ounces, respectively. The 6S and 6S Plus are 0.28 and 0.29 inches thick and weigh 5.04 and 6.77 ounces. You couldn’t call them heavy, but the 6Ses have more heft to them (their camera bumps are still intact, however).

If the new aluminum and the higher weight actually do make the phones sturdier than the 6es, I’d call the tradeoff worth it. I never ran into any “bendgate” problems with my iPhone 6, but I did put a pretty good dent in the back when I dropped it once (it fell on its back on a gravel path, and it got dented even though it was in a case). Apple seems committed to extending the useful life of its devices—iOS 9 works on the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, which is an unprecedented amount of extended support—so it’s good to see the company taking steps to make the outsides more durable, too.

The new rose gold color is a nice addition to the lineup. It’s a gentle, pleasant shade of pink, nowhere near as intense as the pink version of the iPhone 5C, and it will pair well with the rose gold Apple Watch Sport if you’re into matching your iDevices to one another.

The thing the Apple reps on the floor were emphasizing the most was the 3D Touch feature, which is easy to demo and does seem like it will be legitimately useful—there’s obvious value in being able to click on something to get more information without completely switching apps or in opening up a right-click-style menu with a bunch of commonly used shortcuts in it.

When you’re in an app, there are two interactions to know about: “peek” and “pop.” Peek, enabled by gently pressing down on an element, can do things like look up addresses in Maps and load pages in Safari in a special view without leaving the app. Lift your finger, and go back to what you were doing. Many apps also let you slide up in a “peek” view to do other things like deleting a photo or marking an e-mail as unread. “Pop,” activated by pressing down harder, switches you to the app that you’re using in your “peek.”

The main problem with 3D Touch is going to be teaching it to people. Based on reader comments and Twitter questions I’ve seen, people already have trouble distinguishing a 3D Touch (pressing down harder) from a long-press (pressing down longer), and both interactions are still available in iOS 9. It was something I had trouble with while adjusting to the Apple Watch—the iPhone and iPad had trained me to use long presses in many places where WatchOS actually wanted Force Touches. You don’t need to know how to use 3D Touch to use the iPhone 6Ses, but it’s a major new feature, and it’s not quite as intuitive as the original multitouch technology Apple compared it to.

We’ll be giving both iPhones a thorough review as soon as we can get them—preorders start on September 12, and the release date is September 25.

About that 16GB model

Ars Technica readers are generally pretty savvy, and most of you would never turn down extra storage for apps and movies that you’ve downloaded. But there’s one thing that everyone uses their phone for, even if they spend little time on the App Store and stream absolutely everything—pictures. People take pictures. They take movies. They did it before smartphones existed, and now that smartphone cameras are actually pretty good they do it even more.

We’ve been complaining about the 16GB iPhone base model for a while now. iOS 9’s space-saving features and lower pricing for cloud storage are Apple’s official solutions to the problem, but the iPhone 6S-series cameras are going to make those entry-level phones feel more restrictive than they did before. You can’t upgrade to 12MP photos (with extra frames for the Live Photos feature, no less, which by some accounts doubles the size of a standard picture) and 4K video without eating up more storage, but the iPhone 6S’ local storage didn’t grow to accommodate the new capabilities.

The only real justification for keeping the base iPhone at 16GB is financial. Bump it to 32GB, and you’ll get fewer upgraders to the 64GB and 128GB tiers. As far as the company’s bottom line is concerned, it makes sense for Apple to incentivize those upgrades. Using iCloud storage along with the iCloud Photo Library can alleviate this, since it stores the full-resolution photos in the cloud but can keep smaller, “good enough for your phone” versions locally. But from a user’s perspective it’s hard to see why Apple can’t go from 16GB to 32GB at the same price—it managed to go from 32GB to 64GB and from 64GB to 128GB without raising prices.

The new Apple TV starts at 32GB. The iPad Pro starts at 32GB. It’s time for the iPhone (and, for that matter, all the other iPads) to follow suit.

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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