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The iPhone 5s Review
- glhaynes 13y agoSupposing A-series chip performance continues to improve at the rate it has been, how long until an Apple TV with the then-current high-end A chip puts games on a TV of the same quality as current-gen video game systems? What about next-gen?
- mbell 13y agoWhile it's far from a complete measure of performance, one data point is that the PS4 GPU is capable of 1.84 tflops, the 5s GPU is capable of 76.8 gflops, only ~4.2% the throughput of the PS4.
- Alphasite_ 13y agoWell yes, but the thermals are less of a battery when you don't have to worry about battery condition or battery usage.
- 6ren 13y agoxbox360's Xenos GPU has 240 gflops. Maybe iPad 5 will reach this, by x4 the iPad 4's 76.8 gflops. The series 6 rogue GPU has a lot of headroom.
- flakmonkey 13y agoThe GPU in the PS4 is, essentially, an Nvidia 7900-class GPU. Anandtech recently did a comparison of old PC GPUs to current SOCs and the results are surprisingly close. I'd imagine Snapdragon 800 and Oscar close the gap considerably. http://anandtech.com/show/6877/the-great-equalizer-part-3/3 http://anandtech.com/show/6877/the-great-equalizer-part-3/3 edit: I'm stuck in past. This comment is about PS3 not PS4.
- glasshead969 13y agoMinor correction: A7 SOC is cyclone not oscar. The article was updated. IMO cyclone is a apt name given benchmarks. oscar is name for M7.
- Impossible 13y agoThe PS4 GPU is significantly more powerful (orders of magnitude) than an Nvidia 7900 class GPU, unless you meant PS3 or Radeon 7900 series :).
- flakmonkey 13y agoThanks for the correction.
- twodayslate 13y agoThis is one of the most thorough reviews I have ever seen. I loved all the information and benchmarks.
- acchow 13y agoYou should check out Brian's HTC One review. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6747/htc-one-review http://www.anandtech.com/show/6747/htc-one-review The only upsetting part was that it took eternity to come out :(
- asafira 13y agoAnandtech has really stellar reviews, and this review is just one example. I'm sure the number of charts and plots loses the people with shorter attention spans, but the alternative really is a far more vague review. I remember The Verge's video review of the Moto X filled with the phrase "the ___ is awesome", making it borderline useless. Moreover, I actually feel like I am gaining a much deeper understanding of the hardware internals when reading Anandtech reviews. While other reviews would simply say "the processor makes for a very snappy experience", Anandtech explains the new 28nm architecture and thus exactly how much potential it has to be more efficient, the overhead required to deal with 32 vs 64 bit apps, etc. Unless someone can show me otherwise, my tech news reading experience over the last few years leads me to believe that Anantech is in its own class when it comes to consumer technology reviews.
- eigenvector 13y agoAnandTech = reviews for engineers. The use of actual lab-bench display testing alone puts them in a category of their own.
- ibrahima 13y agoBy engineers, for engineers, I might add. No offense, but most writers on tech sites tend to be writers who are interested in technology, whereas AnandTech is full of engineers who are interested in dissecting and explaining technology. Not to pick on anyone, but if you gave the writers at The Verge, for instance, a month to review the iPhone 5S they would not cover the depth that the first page of this review covers.
- Hillary_Pe 13y agoOnly 1GB RAM?! bah humbug
- kylelibra 13y agoI was hoping they had finally bumped it up to 2gb, but I guess not. I often read this is related to battery life, can anyone corroborate?
- jevinskie 13y agoDRAM requires periodic refreshing or the cells lose their memory. This refreshing uses energy. More bits, more energy. You get the same issue with SRAM (think CPU caches) though without the refreshing.
- krallja 13y agoYes, DRAM requires power to refresh its memory. That's why computers can't use DRAM as permanent storage.
- glasshead969 13y agoAt least it's LPDDR3, so it should be faster than iPhone 5.
- auctiontheory 13y agoYeah, that's a surprise. Increasing RAM would surely have been an easy way to speed up video editing. What else are we to do with the fancy camera?!
- Aloha 13y agoI never considered video editing a key application for my mobile telephone. Even with the camera, I would expect to take the video on the phone, and edit it elsewhere.
- JeremyBanks 13y ago
- mirsadm 13y agoInterestingly enough the GPU is approximately the same speed as the upcoming (or current?) generation of Android phones with the Snapdragon 800 SOC. In the past Apple has generally held a large performance advantage in that area. There is potential that in 6 months when the next Galaxy/HTC phones are released that they will be significantly ahead of Apple for 6 or more months.
- wklauss 13y agoI'm not sure current benchmarks can really measure the A7 correctly, or if they are at all ready to deal with OpenGL ES 3.0.
- gilgoomesh 13y agoAs Anandtech points out: the iPhone 5s' PowerVR Series 6 moves to a fully scalar architecture (allowing better shaders and GPGPU performance) but loses a lot of raw triangle performance in the process (30-50% slower than iPhone 5 in some cases). On shader heavy scenes (T-Rex HD) the tradeoff is worth it (iPhone 5s is 30% faster than any other GPU). Apple (and PowerVR) have made a couple tradeoffs in this generation that sacrifice performance on some tests for better shader capabilities. Final point: it'll be interesting to see what these numbers look like when the bugs in the different graphics tests are resolved (are they compiled using the armv8 instruction set?)
- flakmonkey 13y ago
- blinkingled 13y agoLooking at the benchmarks - the A7 SoC is a pretty darn great achievement for Apple! And more than that it is a serious threat to Intel given it is within striking distance of 22nm Bay Trail at 28nm and two less cores! If they continue this - the next gen MacBook Airs will be running the A8 or even A7x with full day battery life. Intel better have something disruptive up their sleeves!
- dangrossman 13y ago8 days ago Intel demoed Broadwell, its 14nm Haswell shrink that cuts power usage another 30%.
- turing 13y agoAs Dan said, it's not as if Intel is standing still. I definitely don't expect any Macs to be running ARM for at least a few years. Would definitely be interesting though :) For those that haven't read the full review, here's a quote from Anand that addresses this topic: As far as Macs go though, there's still a big gap between the A7 and where Intel is at with Haswell. The deficiency that Intel had in the ultra mobile space simply doesn't translate to its position with the big Core chips. I don't see Apple bridging that gap anytime soon.
- arrrg 13y agoCurrent MacBook Airs already get full-day battery life. Apple/ARM and Intel are quickly converging from two sides – but the cost of switching architectures (while something Apple certainly has been quite good at in the past) seems too high to me for the payoff, and that’s even if, spec for spec, ARM could beat out Intel. Add to that that the relationship of Apple with Intel seems to be a quite good one (so there is no reason for petty politics) and I really don’t see it happening. 24 hour battery life (instead of 12) and half the performance in a MacBook Air seems hardly worth it to me. To my mind that device is already more constrained by performance than battery life. (Conversely I also don’t see ARM/Apple getting too slow to keep pace with Intel on the mobile side, so I don’t see them switching there to Intel, either.)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- DustinCalim 13y agoReading through the comments here, I see a lot of reference to GPU speeds. Anand mentions in the article that the new iPhone 5s is more powerful than the 2010 Macbook Air 11" and has more graphics performance than the iPad 4. I used to be one of those guys who would build his own PC and spend hours overclocking everything for the maximum performance gain but I do not understand this; What's the infatuation with performance in a cell phone? Snappy is snappy but there are diminishing returns here past a certain point; I think Anand stated it best when he said it is "the most future-proof of any iPhone ever launched"
- Derander 13y agoI care about cell phone performance because I'm excited for the day when I can realistically start booting a general purpose OS on my phone and call it good enough w/ a monitor and external keyboard.
- brymaster 13y agoThat will also be the day where you need to 'jailbreak your PC' thanks to Apple.
- hboon 13y ago> What's the infatuation with performance in a cell phone? With better raw CPU and GPU performances, it's easier and faster to write decent code with less time spent on optimisation and well as a great UI — Motion Effects and UIKit Dynamics (supporting parallax effects, physics engine, 30D/layered look) requires a powerful GPU. Games, of course always push the performance of CPU and GPUs. I doubt there'll ever be future-proof hardware in terms of performance, unless the software is dead.
- Someone 13y agoOne advantage: the faster the hardware, the more time it can spend in idle states at the same load. So, if you manage to speed up your hardware by a factor X while increasing power usage by a factor < X, it is a net win (I don't know whether they achieve this)
- corporalagumbo 13y agoI find Apple so incredibly impressive. They target a few key features with every release, absolutely nail those features, and sell the new products perfectly. Their product line-ups and messages are constantly evolving, but slowly, determinedly. And so they achieve things no other company seems capable of - like an unlocking mechanism that is going to be market-defining. Why? Because when the other companies become jealous and try and come up with their own versions, they'll rush and release something half-baked, and out of the confusion only Apple's solution will speak to consumers. Apple is so far ahead of the competition it's ridiculous - maybe Google can compete in the medium-term, I'm not sure. Apple's confidence and poise is awe-inspiring.
- ajross 13y agoNot responding to the fawning per se, but specifically the "unlocking mechanism that is going to be market-defining": face unlock seems undeniably cooler still, works reasonably well, has been shipping on all Android phones for nearly two years now, yet certainly hasn't "defined" any markets. How exactly is putting a little scanner inside a button going to be meaningfully better? Like face unlock, it's at best a cute trick. Apple's past genius has been about finding new fundamental ways to use technology. Slightly easier protection against spousal snooping doesn't qualify, sorry.
- pbreit 13y agoFace Unlock doesn't work very well, is less secure and much more difficult. This is hardly a "cute trick". We are going to see the rapid expansion of fingerprints in place of passwords and it is going to be pretty neat.
- rurounijones 13y agoI sincerely hope not since, as a recent HN submission pointed out, you [EDIT] possibly [/EDIT] lose all 5th amendment protections in the US when your device is no longer protected by "something you know" "As well as" == fine "Instead of" == run!
- sideproject 13y agowhat an EXCELLENT review. Seriously. The author went through so much detail. It's ridiculous how thorough this review is - loved it. Thank you.
- jordanthoms 13y agoAs usual for Anandtech - by far the best review site around, at least for the technology side of devices.
- dragontamer 13y agoI wouldn't call it "by far" the best. TechReport IMO has taken a similar style of super-duper in-depth reviews. Phoronix is the only review site that does this kind of in-depth review... except from a Linux-slant. (how good are the drivers for various graphics cards. Which CPU offers the best compile times, etc. etc.) What CNet lacks in depth, it gains in breadth. CNet has far far more reviews of decent quality than any other site I know. In comparison, the few reviews that Anandtech / TechReport do are far far deeper than anything from CNet. I think overall, I prefer TechReport over Anandtech.
- pbreit 13y ago5S definitely a nice upgrade and I don't see any reason to get a 5C beyond color and slight battery life advantage (presumably on non-motion usage). Saving $100 on a $2,000+ service contract is nothing. But I'm super disappointed that Apple didn't target 5S battery life for dramatic improvement. The 5's battery life is already awful and it looks like 5S is even worse. Ugh.
- sandipc 13y agohttp://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/9 http://anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/9 with the exception of cellular talk time, the 5 and 5S are near the top...
- sliverstorm 13y agoGee, silly me, caring about the cellular talk time on my phone. That's the last thing anyone should use a phone for.
- EpicEng 13y agoYou talk on your phone for 9.3+ hours /day between charges? That sucks, I'm sorry.
- tkxxx7 13y agoJudging from my own use and people I know, cellular talk time is one of the things people do on smartphones the _least_ these days.
- gfodor 13y agoIn 10 years the word "phone" will no longer be associated with voice communications more than any other type.
- stinos 13y agoI know exactly how you feel, but I'm pretty sure people using smarthphones nowadays practically stopped caring about battery life as it's close to non-existent anyway since you have to plug in your device every single day. Personally I couldn't live like that (nor can you probably, if I interpret the tone of your post correctly), partly because I don't want to be enslaved to charging partly because I would forget it anyway, so the only option left is to either buy a phone that's not so 'smart' hence doesn't starve the battery in a day or get a smartphone and don't use it's smart features. As far as I can see, there's just no way around it. Which is an utter shame of course. As a comparision: I've always been a portable audio fan and in that area there seems to actually have been an increase in battery life while for the phone market it seems to be the other way around. I have a semi-professional portable player/recorder and using two standard AA batteries it serves me well playing audio for over a month. Or actually so long I never counted, but will be easily over 40 hours. It's a joy to use compared to any phone I ever owned, except the fixed on on my desk :]
- toksaitov 13y ago8x MSAA. Impressive.
- bobbles 13y agoDoes this mean AA is actually applied in games? Not quite sure what to make of it.
- toksaitov 13y agoPowerVR TBDR architecture is great at handling MSAA. I think quite a lot of games will be able to use it (as it was with 4x) http://gdcvault.com/play/1015331/Bringing-AAA-Graphics-to-Mobile http://gdcvault.com/play/1015331/Bringing-AAA-Graphics-to-Mo... (~page 28)
- cpprototypes 13y agoDoes anyone else think like we're already in the "core 2 duo" era of smartphones? I look at my galaxy s3 and the newer phones and don't feel much motivation to upgrade.
- devx 13y agoThe nice thing about the mobile platforms like iOS and Android, is that they feel as fast as the Core 2 Duo era, even with lower end hardware than that, because the apps themselves and the OS, too, are a lot leaner than the ones on the PC a few years ago.
- bobbles 13y agoIn the daringfireball.net review Gruber specifically mentions in benchmarking the 5s outperforms the 2008 15" macbook that he has. It's hard for me to justify from a 'need' perspective to go from my 4S to the 5s, since to be honest the 4S has no slowdown at all and is a great phone. I'll probably end up donating it to my mum and moving her from dumbphone into smartphone land.
- Marazan 13y agoFingerprint scanning is yet more evidence that the iPhone was designed in sunny south California rather than chilly northern Europe. Resistive touch screen may not allow multi-touch, but at least I can use them when wearing gloves (and no - gloves with a capacitive finger tip don't count).
- gfodor 13y agoJust because there are segments of the population who can not take advantage of a feature at all times does not mean the feature is unwarranted or designed without considering this fact.
- interpol_p 13y ago> yet more evidence that the iPhone was designed in sunny south California The evidence is also on the phone itself where it says "Designed by Apple in California"
- vacri 13y agoNoseprint?
- Marazan 13y agoI have once dialled a call using only my nose.
- actionscripted 13y agoIt allows for 5 stored "fingers", so you could set things up for each thumb, each index finger and your nose. Assuming there aren't any security issues about using a nose -- and that you're not worried about security much anyways -- you should be golden. How unique are nose prints?
- nutanc 13y agoAll I can say is that TouchID is the new Siri.
- seertaak 13y agoAny ARM experts around? The sagacity of the move to 64-bit is explained in terms of getting rid of cruft, and via analogy to a similar move by Intel on the x86 line. But I thought that the largest boost to that line comes from the many additional registers available under 64 bit mode. In ARM, with its RISC architecture, there are already a nice number of registers, so I'm wondering where the true advantage lies -- especially an environment of strongly constrained memory.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pja 13y agoYes, the biggest boost to x86 performance in the move to 64 bit came mostly because they doubled the number of regsiters available to what was previously a very register poor ISA. The ARM ISA has different legacy issues: the design makes it much more expensive than it otherwise would be to pipeline the CPU in order to get decent performance. The ISA was designed for an in-order CPU: at the time pipelining was something that mainframe / workstation class CPUs did. (ARM was designed in the very early 80s; Intel released a pipelined CPU in 1989 - the 486, and then only for simple instructions.) For instance, every ARM32 assembly instruction has a bunch of condition codes which determine whether to execute the instruction depending on the state of the status bits in the program counter. You can also determine whether a given instruction will set the relevant status bits in the processor. This means you can do nice things like encode an if (R2 < 0) then (Add 1 to R3) else (Add 1 to R4) in just three instructions: one for the test, an instruction if the relevant flag is set & a second instruction to run if it's not set. No branches! You can also branch on any or all of the condition flags. This makes for very compact code. The trouble is that it's hell to pipeline because you have to keep track of all the possible states of the status bits and follow all the possible branch paths that result, whilst keeping track of all the dependencies. They've also done things like simplify the exception handling so that the CPU needs fewer shadow registers, which again reduces power requirements.
- pja 13y agoRealWorldTech has a good article here: http://www.realworldtech.com/arm64/ http://www.realworldtech.com/arm64/ if anyone wants to do a slightly deeper dive into the ARM64 ISA.
- cromwellian 13y agoPersonally, I prefer proximity unlock, I shouldn't have to touch the phone at all. This might be done with Bluetooth LE devices, the same way modern keyless entry works for cars. If my phone is within a meter or two of my keychain, or I'm in my car, then it is unlocked. This is especially important if you want to use it while driving via voice and don't want to have to unlock after each interaction. Ditto for Moto-X style notifications. I shouldn't have to press the home button to see that tweet that just came in, in fact, I should be able to ask the phone to read it to me, through my headphones. The fingerprint scanner is definitely a step up from 2-N touches (swipe to unlock + passcode), 1 touch is better than 2*, but zero touches is even better in some circumstances. Never having to think about needing to unlock.
- calibwam 13y agoThe number one place I would want security on my phone, would be at a bar (or party), where someone might take my phone when I'm distracted, and then doing either something innocent ("lol. im gay. party hard!!!") or nasty (transfer $100 to own account), depending how well I know them. This could easily be done within a meter or two of me, without me noticing. Adding some rules could be nice (be in car, charging at home etc), but generally, I would want my phone to be locked unless I'm holding it.
- cromwellian 13y agoHow about proximity + voice print or proximity + face unlock. It's basically 2-factors. Maybe this is the use case for Google Glass, retinal unlock just by looking at the screen.
- kalleboo 13y agoThat's what I'm worried about with Touch ID. The new "draw a penis on someone's forehead when they're passed out" is going to be "unlock their iPhone with their finger and post things on their Facebook".
- w1ntermute 13y agoYou can do this quite easily with Tasker[0]. At home, you could use the presence of your home wifi network as the indicator that the lock should be disabled, while in your car you could use a passive NFC tag (about 50¢). 0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....
- NicoJuicy 13y agoI thought NFC was more impressive then fingerprints ... :)
- Scaevolus 13y agoComparing CPU performance using Javascript benchmarks isn't very useful-- much of the difference depends on which Javascript engine is being used.
- joakleaf 13y agoIsn't it exactly a very useful benchmark if you are going to use the phone primarily for browsing webpages with javascript on them?
- yules 13y agoCan't wait to get my hands on one. Soon ;)
- mmariani 13y ago""" ...but if Apple doesn’t offer a larger display option soon then I believe it will lose some users not because of cross shopping, but out of frustration. """ I don't get this huge screen trend for phones. That's not a smart move from an ergonomics perspective. Almost person person that has a phone with a big screen has to use both hands to comfortably use the phone, one to touch and the other to hold. One would argue that more pixels == more content. But that's not an issue with iPhone 5 even though was with previous models. I mean, not an issue if you don't have ads taking up your precious pixels. And that is easily solvable by paying for your content and apps which has other benefits too. Anyway, I feel the iPhone 5 screen size is perfect. And I still have one hand free to do whatever I want. I think more pixels are not more useful than a hand. People who think that too won't get phones with cumbersome screens, unless they have huge hands.
- babesh 13y agoI think certain kinds of content just look better on a big screen ex: videos and images. Also, if you have a limited budget you are not buying both a phone and a tablet (for the bigger screen to consume content). Instead you could buy a phablet to do both. So trade off one handed use for your phone against the cost of a tablet and not having access to the tablet at times. That's the tradeoff from the consumer's standpoint. From Apple's standpoint, they would have to design a phablet that works wells and can be economically produced. So for example, if they want the same quality screen as the iPhone, would the screen have really low yield rates and would thus be uneconomical to produce? Are there issue with building a larger aluminium frame? Do they have higher priorities or different products that they want to create?
- kalleboo 13y agoApple users always emphasize how things "feel". When I come back to my iPhone after having used an Android phone for a few days, I feel cramped. I feel like I'm constantly scrolling and zooming. I'd love a bigger screen. The thing is, "I feel the iPhone 5 screen size is perfect"... for YOU. Lots of people said the iPhone 4 screen size was perfect and Apple would never change that. Lots of people are buying the Galaxy Note devices too (especially in Asia).
- 13y ago
- marincounty 13y agoI miss Steve Jobs. I once remember him saying something like,'I'm a little worried about Cook; he's not a gadget guy.' Did anyone notice during the Apple press conference, the head honchos tried to capture Steve's enthusiasm, but it seemed forced? I don't understand why they are making such a big deal out of multiple colors? I guess it's a calculated marketing decision? Maybe they think the Iphone will end up a fashion statement? Sorry, but I don't think Job's would care about different colors, or a fingerprint scan--at this point in history. I'm pretty sure hackers will find a way around around the scan pretty quick? Out of respect for Jobs, I'm more than content with my Iphone 4, and my Ipad 2. They get the job done, and their still perfect for my needs. I don't think I'll buy another mac book pro for a long time. I have a feeling I'll be able to buy parts forever?
- rahoulb 13y agoI would say phones are already fashion statements (or at the very least lifestyle statements, if you want to make the distinction). I'm sure Steve Jobs understood this - since his return, Apple has consistently made emotional appeals, not technical ones. Their "innovations" are generally improving on the execution of existing technology (music players, smartphones, tablets) but packaging it in a way that people connect with. Colour, on a device that you carry with you everywhere you go, is very much a part of this.
- allsystemsgo 13y agoIf you watch the keynote when the mac came in different colors, you'll see he emphasizes their new see through body and colors just as much as apple is emphasizing the iPhone 5C's colors. In fact, Apple had a poster with all the different colored macs in a circle, and below that it just said "Yum". Steve Jobs said Tim Cook isn't so much of a product guy, correct. But that was Steve's opinion. I don't necessarily agree with that sentiment. And out of respect for jobs you're sticking with dated technology? I don't quite understand... If he were alive he'd probably push you to update your device.
- nicholassmith 13y agoI think the Anandtech reviews are one of my favourite parts of a new iOS device launch, talk about thorough. Interesting comment was made that the A7 seems capable of driving a larger Retina screen than the iPhone, which gives credence to the rumour that the next Mini will shift to Retina, if they've managed to offset the battery life concerns as well anyway. The A7 does seem really rather impressive, I don't know hardware as well as I'd like, but that was some fairly effusive praise in the review.
- atestu 13y agoIt's not that surprising given that the A5 has been powering the iPad's retina screen… Or am I missing something?
- JonFish85 13y agoFocusing on the fingerprint unlock thing. I'm curious how this is going to evolve. I wonder if this will be the new two-factor auth. If I want to log into a website (via Safari of course) on my Macbook Pro, do I have to swipe my finger on my iPhone? I wonder if something like this could start replacing passwords (long-term)?
- carlesfe 13y agoI read somewhere that a fingerprint couldn't replace a password, as they are different auth methods, and the fingerprint can't really replace the password. Does anybody know why? I searched the article but haven't been able to find it.
- ajanuary 13y agoMy guess is it's referring to the "something you have", "something you are" and "something you know" [1] Current two-factor authentication on the web combines something you know (password) with something you have (mobile phone with an app that generates tokens). The parent is suggesting this could change to something you know (password) and something you are (fingerprint). It could easily be extended to include something you have by combining the fingerprint with a token generator on your iPhone. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication
- goldudu 13y agoIt smells like 2005 nokia to me.