If you’re an Apple fan, you’re probably feeling pretty giddy about Apple’s event coming up this Wednesday, September 9th. If you’ve been keeping up with Apple for the past 4 years or so, you know that the beginning of autumn seems to be when Apple likes to unveil its latest iPhone generation. This year, we’re expecting to see two “s” generation iPhones unviled: the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus.
Apple’s “s” generation of iPhones have always been about upgrading the internals of the device rather than the shell. Typically you will see a spec bump and a few newly supported features that the previous generation iPhone didn’t have, but the two generations would look identical.
This year’s rumor round-up has been about the same as any other year. Yes, there will be a spec bump. Yes, there will be some new features. No, it probably isn’t going to blow your pants off, but if you’ve been waiting a couple of years or more to upgrade your iPhone then you’ll probably be happy with what’s about to pop up.
I know that sounds underwhelming, and maybe I’m just so used to the upgrade cycle of iPhones at this point that I try not to get carried away anymore. But when I look at the rumors of the iPhone 6s (and 6s Plus) I can’t help but think that absolutely nothing stands out to me so much that I anticipate feeling like I’m going to need to go out and get this phone.
From what I gather, we can possibly expect the following out the two 6s’s: processor upgrade, 2GB of RAM, camera upgrade on both sides, casing reinforcement (which would mean a slight change to the housing of the 6s and 6s Plus compared to last year’s, most likely due to ‘Bendgate’ problems), and then the most talked about feature, Force Touch.
Aside from that, there have been rumors of a smaller battery and no reason to think that the starter 16GB iPhone will be upgraded to 32GB (although I still think that would be the easiest upgrade Apple could implement to make people happy).
So yeah, I guess you could say I feel a little underwhelmed at this point, especially because I don’t think that Force Touch is enough on its own to really sell people on the 6s. That isn’t to say that I don’t think Force Touch won’t become a key feature in smartphones one way or another, because judging by the looks of it Force Touch does seem like it has a huge convenience factor that most other smartphones don’t have yet. But it just doesn’t seem like Force Touch solves any real problems that people have, especially when you have more prominent problems to deal with.
Like, say, poor battery life or a base amount of internal storage that is too low for a flagship device.
I think that if Apple were to drastically improve the battery life and internal storage of the iPhone, people would be thrilled. I’m somewhat surprised that Apple has been stingy with the internal storage of the iPhone thus far, given that one of the main reasons the iPod was so popular was due to the mass amounts of storage it had compared to other mp3 players on the market.
I’ve owned a few iPhones over the past few years. I’ve had the iPhone 4s, the iPhone 5s, and now I’m using the iPhone 6. My best experience by far was with the iPhone 4s because of three thoughts I had when I first started using the phone:
“Wow, iOS is really fast.”
“16GB of storage really lasts me a long time.”
“I can’t believe this battery lasts more than 5 hours.”
I honestly did not care much about Siri. Compared to its Android counterparts, the iPhone 4s had exceptional performance in my opinion. However, while I still think that iOS is still a fast, smooth operating system, the other two reasons I liked my 4s so much haven't been valid thoughts since. 16GB of internal storage is no longer considered to be “a lot”, and while my iPhone 6 does still last more than 5 hours, other smartphones far surpass the battery life of the iPhone 6.
I once truly thought that Apple’s iPhone was superior to most Android and Windows Phone devices, but now it seems like the iPhone is only "amazing" when you pit it against other, older iPhones. When you throw it out there in a sea of other smartphones, it’s not exactly anything we haven’t seen before. However, there are certain things that the iPhone “just does” better than other platforms – a discussion to tackle in another article – which is why I think it’s still able to thrive throughout such a saturated market.
I could be way off the mark when it comes to predicting how well Force Touch will fare with potential iPhone 6s users. I don’t think it will deter anybody who already has their heart set on the 6s from getting it, but I don’t think it will initially cause a lot of people to start caring if they hadn’t previously. Since it will be a new concept in smartphones, outside of stock Apple applications there probably won’t be much use for it, kind of like “edges” in Samsung devices. A neat concept, but not much real world usage yet. It’s a first step in a concept that could – and hopefully will – grow.
There’s always the hope that Apple will pull a “Gotcha!” and surprise everybody with something we haven’t already heard, but they haven’t for the past few years and I’m not sure one could reasonably hold onto that hope now. One can cautiously dream, though.