Every year Apple managed to pull off what every other smartphone company can never do, makes its devices equally popular despite incremental updates.

The new iPhone 6s is not a radical departure from the iPhone 6 last year, in fact it looks identical, but will still sell in tens of millions over the coming months. Apple is the king at this kind of marketing, but beneath it all is the iPhone 6s, which is just a very good products.

Sure, nothing has changed aesthetically but it is hard to deny that the iPhone 6s is one of the best looking smartphones available. The device is a little heavier because it now has a stronger aluminum to avoid a repeat of 2014’s Bendgate, but aside from that there are no changes. The new iPhone devices get a rose gold colorway which is more like a kind of pink, and while that seems hideous it is actually stunning in person.

It reminds us of when Apple introduced the gold color and we thought it would suck, but it was actually classy and premium looking. The rose gold variant is the same.

We know that some people think it is a mystery that Apple has now upgraded to 1080p Full HD for its core flagship. Yes, the iPhone 6s Plus gets 1080p, but the iPhone 6s does not and on the surface that is indeed a mystery, especially considering Apple’s main Android rivals are already deep into the Quad HD cycle.

The iPhone 6s comes with a screen that on paper at least is two generations worse than other main flagships. However, the 4.7-inch IPS display on the iPhone 6s may only have 750 x 1334 resolution and a pixel density of 326ppi, but you know what it will be? It will be one of the best screens on the market, just like other iPhones have shown… we don’t know how Apple does it with limited specs but it does, don’t make the error of thinking this a subpar display, it simply is not.

Indeed, this screen actually comes with something new and unique. 3D Touch is the update of Force Touch that debuted alongside the Apple Watch. We will be making a full dedicated post on 3D Touch before the weekend, but essentially this display reads the pressure you place upon it and acts accordingly. This can be applied to myriad features and tools.

Ok, we know the Apple A9X is built by Samsung, and ha-ha we get the joke. However, once again Apple confounds the smartphone market by not discussing specs and actually using small amounts of RAM relative to other flagships. But yet the iPhone year on year is among the best smartphones in terms of performance, a testament to the smooth and quick iOS platform. Here the A9 is 80% faster than last year’s A8 in CPU tasks and a massive 90% faster in GPU tasks. That’s a bold claim, but if true it is spectacular on Apple’s part to have gotten such a performance hike in the space of one year. The silicon is also more power efficient, which means battery life is smoother and performance enhanced, which in turn allows Siri to always be on in standby mode.

Battery life will look something like this:

Talk time: Up to 14 hours on 3G
Internet use: Up to 10 hours on 3G, up to 10 hours on LTE, up to 11 hours on Wi‑Fi
HD video playback: Up to 11 hours
Audio playback: Up to 50 hours
Standby time: Up to 10 days

Those looking for a storage breakthrough at Cupertino will be disappointed, the iPhone 6s will come with a 16GB base model, 64GB model, and a 128GB model. Of course a micro SD card slot is out of the question, which only makes us wish even more that Apple would make the base storage variant 32GB.

Apple is a leading example at showing that megapixels are not the be all and end all of camera technology. Recent iPhones have come with an 8 megapixel lens in recent years while Android rivals went bigger and bigger, but yet the iPhone has consistently been one of the best “camera phones” on the market.

The 12 megapixel lens on the iPhone 6s should be really good then, and Apple is certainly suggesting that it indeed is. We will be posting a dedicated iPhone 6s camera post in the coming days.

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