When the iPhone 6S hit the shops, we called it “a very good phone, ruined by rubbish battery life”. A year on, with the iPhone 7 on the shelves and iOS 10 on devices, the 6S is now the budget option in Apple’s line-up. But how has the phone aged? Is it still very good? Does the battery life still suck? Will the 6S be remembered as a high point in the iPhone’s history, or an era to be slightly buried?
I’ve been using an iPhone 6S – in rose gold, naturally, and I’m not even sure if I’m doing this out of irony anymore – for the past year. Some of what I hated, I’ve come to love, and some of what I loved, I’ve come to hate. And some bad stuff is just still bad.
The good
Apple’s marketing is usually true: each new iPhone is the best it has ever made. Even a “bad” new iPhone will see enough incremental updates in areas like the camera, processor and wireless connectivity that it’s hard to recommend its predecessor over it – for the same price, anyway.
In those areas, the 6S continues the trend, even after a year of wear, tear, and lust over other devices pushing the envelope with rival operating systems.
Take the processor. The A9 which sits at the core of the iPhone 6S still feels snappy, a year on, whether you’re running iOS 10 or sticking with the older version until the bugs are ironed out. It’s a blessing and a curse for Apple: the A10 is faster still, but the phones are reaching the point where it’s increasingly tricky to argue that faster processors really improve anything. That helps explain why the company focused instead on the battery life improvements when showing off the new silicon.
And the camera also holds its own. The “Shot on iPhone 6S” campaign makes the case better than words can: it’s possible to take really good pictures with the 6S. But the better the camera gets, the more the intrinsic flaws of the form factor are highlighted. The tiny focal length means that all iPhone pictures are ultra-wide angle. It’s perfect for portraits taken from very close up, and snaps of large things which you can’t get some distance from, but it’s generally quite hard to frame a nice picture.
But that’s a good problem to have. The 6S is a good enough camera that you start noticing the ways in which it falls short of actual cameras, rather than comparing it just to phones. It helps explain why Apple decided to shove a “telephoto” lens in the 7 Plus, however.
One surprise positive is 3D touch. For my first few months with the 6S, I was scathing about the feature, which largely existed to provide a few shortcuts to apps developed by trendy devs with a desire to support every new aspect of the hardware at launch. But as time went on, the cohort of apps that support 3D touch swelled, and the shortcuts became a regular part of my routine.
The launch of iOS 10 has only improved things further: 3D touch now feels perfectly analogous to the right click button on a Mac. Do you need it? No. Will it make things easier if you’re any sort of power user? Yes.
The bad
Where 3D touch grew on me, one of its flagship uses has not. Live Photos felt cool and new when the 6S launched: a nice flourish on top of the already-strong camera, which gave me something to interact with when showing pics to friends and family. “Here’s the beautiful waterfall we saw on holiday, look at it move!”
But a year on, the downsides are outweighing the fun flourish. The extra storage space required for the pictures is starting to bite – not only on my phone, but also on my iCloud storage and on the Mac the whole thing syncs to. The requirement to 3D touch the screen to activate the live photos is irritating and surprisingly difficult to pull off, requiring me to shift the position I’m holding my phone in. And worst of all, beautiful moments are stuck in a format I can do nothing with.
Back when I got the 6S, Live Photos felt like a best of both worlds thing: if I didn’t know whether I wanted a picture or video, I could take a Live Photo and get both. But a year on, I look back at moments that I would previously have shot a Vine of, and regret that I took the Live Photo instead, leaving me with a video that can’t be shared to social media, played by default, or easily edit or remix.
That’s a mere irritation, though. The battery life of the 6S is a fatal flaw.
There was unease when it was revealed that the phone would have a lower capacity battery than its predecessor, but Apple assured users that it wouldn’t affect the battery life over all, thanks to the power efficiency of the A9 processor.
Well, it doesn’t feel that way. At its worst, my phone has managed to completely discharge by 9:30am, from a full charge overnight. It’s easy to look for explanations for that abysmal performance: I had bluetooth headphones running; I was on the tube, forcing my phone to expend battery vainly seeking signal; my phone was glued to my hand for the entire time. But it’s just as easy for me to counter it: I don’t have the Facebook app, I didn’t play any power-hungry games in that period, I didn’t watch video, I didn’t make a call. The battery life is just rubbish, and it’s relieving to see that Apple knows it: the launch of the iPhone 7 was big on battery life improvements. But then, so was iOS 9, introducing a battery saver mode that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing.
One year on, though, and there’s an even worse aspect of the battery life: the iPhone 6S seems to have problems with cold weather. Last winter, when the temperature in the UK hovered around 2˚C, my phone got in the habit of shutting off when its battery dropped to about 30%. It would turn on again, only to close a few seconds after booting, until you went inside and it warmed up. I even managed to replace the device at the Apple Store, but the problem was only fixed when summer came.
While we’re on problems which Apple doesn’t seem to think exist, the 6S seems to have a poor bluetooth antenna. My Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones connect just fine, but if you put the 6S in tight jeans and then head to a place with some bluetooth interference – in most cities, that just means “outside” – the audio stutters. At least one other phone (the Nexus 5X) has this problem too, but it’s something that bodes ill for a company that just released a phone with no headphone jack at all. Hopefully the problem doesn’t re-occur in the iPhone 7.
The ugly
The camera nubbin is exactly as irritating as it was when it was introduced with the iPhone 6, two years ago. Objectively: it prevents the iPhone lying flat on surfaces, or sliding smoothly over ledges. Subjectively: it’s an absolutely awful design choice, a nasty compromise between two unasked-for poles. Apple decided the phone had to be the slimmest ever, and the camera the best ever, and the nubbin was the only way to achieve that goal. It is, at heart, the sort of compromise which used to define the difference between Apple hardware and its competitors. No longer.
It’s been said before, but: an iPhone 6S which was a couple of millimetres thicker, had no nubbin, and used that extra width to fit more battery capacity would have been a substantially better phone.
It would still have been too big, though, just not in that particular dimension. It’s the flip-side of what we wrote in our iPhone SE review: that phone, Samuel Gibbs argued, is too small for people used to larger phones. Well, a year on (two if we count my time with the iPhone 6), I can confirm that the 6S is still too large for people used to smaller phones. I’ve started to appreciate the extra size for text content, I will admit, and it makes watching video almost bearable. But the permanent cramp in my little finger is always there reminding me that it’s uncomfortable to hold and use one-handed, and the bodge that is the iPhone’s ‘reachability’ mode reminds me that Apple knows it too.
My little finger will have to suffer a bit longer, though. While the iPhone 7 looks like it improves the battery life, and capitalises on the strengths of the 6S when it comes to the camera, a full hardware redesign is at least another year off. The size issue, and the nubbin, are here to stay.
