Two weeks with the iPhone 6S

I was waiting for September keynote to see what new Apple TV is going to be like, cause I was thinking of getting one. I had just a little curiosity what improvements the S model of the next iPhone will have. And the rumored iPad Pro — almost not interested.

Impressions after the keynote

Apple TV — take my money. I am going to order one on day one. Also I wish I had the time to play with swift cause it’s a good opportunity when a new App Store is opening, but that’s another story (and hopefully by the end of November I’ll write about it).

The iPhone — after they showed the possibilities of 3D Touch (cause that’s how they named it, unlike Force Touch on the Apple Watch) I was actually impressed, because I wasn’t imagining very useful shortcuts for this new tech, but I changed my mind during the keynote. Device speed is always a welcome feature. Camera — even though it’s 12mpx now, it doesn’t make a difference, because that’s not what matters in a camera. 4K may be useful but only if you produce video using your phone, it’s less for hometapes, but good, I’m not mad for improved video. Oh about the video, hardware acceleration is for the Plus model only, like the previous gen. Fingerprint sensor aka Touch ID is near instant — a killer feature!

Key features that made me upgrade

• Phone’s speed — oh god, it’s worth a million.
• 3D Touch — this #%@$ is dope. More about this later.
• Touch ID — anything slower than this is a beta. (Or if you want to offend someone — it’s alpha)
• Fourth reason was this thought (possibly this was the first reason): back when I had the 3GS I was using it till I killed it, I even had to replace parts with time, basically I squeezed all the juice then I had to buy another apple(you see the play of words). With this upgrade cycle you have to drop a huge pile of cash once a few years. But why shouldn’t I upgrade every year and spend only a fraction of the price by selling my current phone? Maybe if we sum everything, it’s cheaper to buy one every ~4 years (but it’s not). By upgrading every year you add just a tiny little extra money for the luxury of having the latest and greatest, and it’s totally worth it. It’s a huge philosophy here, I’m not gonna bother you with this :).
• Haptic feedback - such feedback, much nice.
• M9 coprocessor’s “Hey Siri” is not huge, but still a welcome addition. (and brings us closer to 1984)

It’s like using their upgrade program, that is currently only for U.S.

3D Touch

This is deserves a new chapter in my post. It’s a new generation of touch sensors and while I thought it’s not that cool, it’s actually revolutionary, like capacitative touch screens were back in the days.

This takes interactions with the device to the next level. Besides peek and pop that was showed in the keynote there are tons of other shortcuts and even more are being developed by the army of third party developers.

You know all those iPad exclusive gestures? Four finger swipe up for multitasking; Four finger swipe left/right to switch app; two fingers on the keyboard to move cursor. All these features can’t work on an iPhone due to an obvious reason — screen real estate. The iPhone is meant to be operated with one hand mostly and all these gestures don’t make sense to an iPhone, but thanks to pressure sensitivity we have alternative gestures:

• A deep press on left side of the phone will trigger the multitasking window
• By pressing hard and dragging from the left side of the screen to the right you switch to the previous app.
• And a very cool one: deep pressing on the keyboard turns it into a trackpad to control the cursor — genius!

Now we have access to those iPad exclusive shortcuts, using pressure sensitive screens.

There are many more uses for this screen, and as I said there are more to come. When there’s a new tech, it’s always exciting because this is the beginning and future versions will only improve.

End note

It’s a better, faster version of iPhone 6 and its name clearly says so. If you have an iPhone 6 probably you won’t feel a lot of a difference unless you notice every little lag spike. And as always gaps between two generations are bigger than between a single gen., and so is the cash you’ll have to stash.

I love it and I’m happy for my upgrade.