The iPhone 6 was a runaway success by any measure. The A8 SoC may have been built on a temperamental 20nm process – something that dogged all other phone vendors – but for Apple it didn’t matter. The iPhone 6 was the first iPhone generation with a phablet variant. By all metrics it was a resounding success as it capitalized on this pent-up demand for larger iPhones.
The iPhone 6s continued this success, and in a year of disappointing launches due to the weak showing of the widely used Snapdragon 808 and 810, the 6s and 6s Plus looked particularly good as the competition really couldn’t measure up. There were a lot of Android devices that performed better than the iPhone 6s/6s Plus in some particular area – a better camera or longer battery life, for example – but taken as a whole the iPhones 6s were just clearly superior devices. If nothing else, they hit that particular balance between features and performance that a lot of users were looking for.
Meanwhile, the addition of 3D Touch was the sort of refinement to the user experience that still remains exclusive to the iPhone. Other OEMs have implemented some form of force sensing, but the implementation is not really executed in a way to improve user experience in a noticeable way. Adoption remained weak as well, with no real widespread support in the ecosystem for such features.
That said, the iPhone doesn’t exist in a vacuum on its own. Even in the high-end market segment Apple limits themselves to, they have a loyal opposition, and that opposition is of course Samsung. Looking at the state of affairs there, relative to the iPhone 6s the Galaxy S6 had a better camera for still images, but it was obvious that it couldn’t freeze motion as well. The phone itself felt like a brick despite its 6.8mm thickness due to the relatively enormous battery. Despite the larger battery, battery life on LTE just wasn’t where it needed to be. The Galaxy Note5 was in many ways a similar story, which isn’t too surprising as the Note has moved closer and closer to being a phablet-version of the Galaxy S.
But, as the story goes, Apple’s competition has improved and advanced. The Galaxy S6 gave way to the even better Galaxy S7, HTC finally found their groove with the HTC 10, and OnePlus’s 3 is their best showing yet. The competition is getting better, and with the iPhone 7, Apple can no longer rely on weak competition or pent-up demand for some major feature. The iPhone 7 must stand by its merits against this increasingly stiff competition.
It’s interesting to write a review like this, because for better or worse, I didn’t have serious exposure to the iPhone from the beginning. When the first iPhone launched in 2007, I was in school and still used a flip phone that spent most of its time functioning as an alarm and a timer and not much else. My first exposure to the iPhone was the 3GS a few years later, which left a fairly poor taste in my mouth as it just didn’t feel all that functional. The iPhone 4 was miles better, but even then it felt like the experience was constrained. Something as simple as turn by turn navigation which I took for a given on Android devices like the Galaxy S1/Captivate and the Desire HD/Inspire 4G were basically absent on iOS unless you were willing to pay a significant amount of money for a third party application. The default maps application didn’t offer that kind of functionality and Google Maps was completely absent, as was YouTube. For better or worse, for years after this initial brush with iOS I stuck with Android devices. It wasn’t until iOS 8 and the iPhone 5s that I really started doing any kind of examination of iOS devices again.
Reviews are normally no place to be discussing one’s life story, because realistically no one reading this review really cares about the person writing this review. But the perspective here matters when considering the approach I’ve taken to this review. I’ve spent the past two years using the iPhone 6 as a secondary phone so