6 ms·

iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus: Preliminary Benchmark Results

85 points by srikar 12y ago

shalmanese 12y ago
I'd like to see some PC-phone comparisons now that they're starting to approach parity. By my calculations, the new iPhone seems to be roughly as fast as a 3 - 4 year old Macbook Air.
bhartzer 12y ago
I don't do a lot of gaming on my phone or on a tablet, so seems to me that the best bet right now (for me) is an iPhone 6 Plus.
hocuspocus 12y ago
Do we know how Apple's Cyclone shows roughly 4x better IPC against Krait at Sunspider benchmark? Are the extra registers and bigger L1 enough to explain that?
- Spittie 12y ago
  My best guess is that the Sunspider benchmark like single-threaded performance, and Cyclone destroys Krait/Cortex here. As for why, Cyclone's core are bigger, wider compared to Krait/Cortex, and are Out Of Order. (This is a nice article on that: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/179473-apples-a7-cyclone-cpu-detailed-a-desktop-class-chip-that-has-more-in-common-with-haswell-than-krait http://www.extremetech.com/computing/179473-apples-a7-cyclon...)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rgonzales 12y ago
I think the real standout here is NVIDIA. Shield was such an interesting product from the very beginning, it's nice to see how it is actually holding up against some of the "big boys".
- asendra 12y ago
  To be fair, the Nvidia shield mentioned in these benchmarks is a 8" tablet, not a smartphone. I think k1 hasn't yet been shown in a smartphone form factor. Given the limitations caused by size, it's not really a fair comparison.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Especially considering that these devices are all thermally limited: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/SoC-throttling.0012-640x480.png http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/SoC-th...
jonchang 12y ago
I wonder if it's time to start scaling mobile benchmarks by the size of the device.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  Some benchmarks are already scaled by screen size. Those have on screen and off screen versions.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Doesn't the "offscreen" test do that? i.e. render something on an offscreen, fixed and uniform resolution on all devices? Although battery performance should probably be normalized to battery size / amperage, yeah. Bigger phones usually have the same resolution as their smaller siblings but larger battery capacity.
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  It would make sense, bigger device allows for larger die and more ram, battery, etc. Seems like bigger devices will usually squander their extra resources however and have similar performance to the smaller devices.
- watty 12y ago
  Split up tablet and phone benchmarks but scaling by size is silly. Is it device size? Screen size? Screen resolution? Weight?
Igglyboo 12y ago
Seems like Apple really knows what consumers want. I spend about 90% of my iPhone time in Safari/Chrome. Advanced 3D graphics are nice and all but I rarely take advantage of them, I'd expect that most users are the same.
- jonknee 12y ago
  The top apps include many graphic heavy games, your usage is most likely not typical (which should be fairly obvious considering what site you're on). Currently top grossing for the US: Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, Pandora, Game of War - Fire Age, Farm Heroes Saga.
  - scott_s 12y ago
    You're assuming, however, that the top downloaded apps represent top phone usage. I have no data on it, but I doubt that's the case. Like Igglyboo, I suspect most users spend most of their phone battery on the "boring" stuff, like listening to music, looking at web pages and email. edit: I'd also like to point out that there are two interesting metrics here: time and battery usage. It's possible for me to spend the majority of my time on boring stuff, but the majority of my battery on non-boring stuff. I'm guessing, though (again, without data and purely based on my own biases) that most people spend most of their time and battery on the boring stuff.
  - nmcfarl 12y ago
    I'm not certain there is a direct correlation between the apps that make the most money in the App Store, and the apps that people spend the most time in. It would mean that all the built in apps, and all the free apps in the App Store relatively unused, and that advertising models are a fools errand as no-one spends enough time in the apps. I suspect companies persuing these kinds of apps, including apple, are seeing enough usage to make a business case for their actions.
    - jonknee 12y ago
      Of the free apps in the US store right now are keyboards (new for iOS 8 and don't really count as "apps") and Facebook Messenger, iTunes U, Amazing Thief (game), The Maze Runner (game), Instagram, Facebook, Beach Buggy Racing (Game), etc. Games are extraordinarily popular on iOS. I see people gaming constantly on planes, trains, busses, etc.
dan1234 12y ago
There's a handy Reddit thread[0] with reports of actual "real world" usage. [0]http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2gzxx1/post_your_battery_stats_screenshots_when_your/ http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2gzxx1/post_your_batt...
- mladenkovacevic 12y ago
  I'm always confused by the terms "Usage" and "Standby". Between those two which is "Time off charger" and which one is "Screen Time"?
  - vijaykiran 12y ago
    I think there's a pretty good explanation here: http://www.scottyloveless.com/ios-battery-life/ http://www.scottyloveless.com/ios-battery-life/
    - mladenkovacevic 12y ago
      Ok that explains it a little bit. So Standby time is basically "Time off Charger", and Usage is supposed to be "Screen on time"? Except I have a feeling that "Usage" includes any time when your phone is not sleeping (which would include not just the time when you have the screen on but also any time when the processor is doing stuff in the background). What draws me to that conclusion is the ratio of usage to standby time that some people in that thread have. I have a hard time believing that most people are staring at their screens for half of their waking life. I mean even if you didn't leave the house all day you'd still have to take your eyes off the thing to prepare food, urinate, put your clothes on.
      - shurcooL 12y ago
        I think that's exactly right.
      - arrrg 12y ago
        Yep, listening to podcasts (with the screen off), for example, is definitely “Usage”. I’m not quite sure how the phone counts background activity that doesn’t notify the user or require user interaction (e.g. Mail checking for new emails, …).
melling 12y ago
Wish they would include the iPhone 5 results. Most people keep a phone for two years.
- jskonhovd 12y ago
  You can run the benchmarks yourself! http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html
- alkonaut 12y ago
  Yeah. And 4 and 4s. I'm interested in what upgrading will give me, not really how it compares to other high end phones (not switching from iOS). I doubt many 5S users are upgrading to 6, but a lot of 4S and 5-users.
- curun1r 12y ago
  It's not convenient, but you can always go back to their 5s review to see the 5/5s difference. http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/5 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/5
mrfusion 12y ago
It seems odd they report 10 hours web browser battery life for the iPhone 5. I'd be lucky to get 1-2 hours of constant browsing.
- josephlord 12y ago
  They are using Wifi and pausing between page loads (so that fast phones don't load 4x as many pages and lose the test). On Wifi 10 hours sounds closer to my experience than 1-2 hours.
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    My phone is 2.5 years old at this point. Maybe I've been losing battery capacity so gradually I've never noticed. That would be amazing to have 13 hours of browsing with a new phone. (as reported in the article)
    - josephlord 12y ago
      Mine is the same age. Note I haven't measured but but hour plus browsing sessions have a fairly negligible impact on the battery so I'm confident it would at least reach about 5 hours (in percentage terms closer to 10 hours than 1-2). When browsing on weak LTE the situation is different and 1-2 hours sounds very plausible. Maps/navigation can take big chunks out of the battery in a period of an hour or two and I need +60% before I set out on a 3 hour bike ride with Cyclemeter on.
    - dan1234 12y ago
      The iPhone 5 was only released 2 years ago (21 Sept 2012), yours can't possibly be 2.5 years old.
      - mrfusion 12y ago
        Ok, apparently I have a 4S. Maybe it's older than I thought.
ksk 12y ago
The A8 chip is "only" a dual-core and clocked at a relatively modest 1.4GHz. It's heartening to see it beat competing 2+GHz Quad-cores. To me, it looks like Apple is comfortable enough with their marketing strategy to stay away from the pointless GHz rat-race that exists in the Android world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth
- ctdonath 12y ago
  Methinks Apple has decided/realized that specs are a cop-out. Customers are, all too often, inundated with numbers not so much to prove how good the product is, but to conceal that it's not good enough. "Meh, the new iPhone has a mere 1.4GHz dual-core, but our product has a 2+GHz quad-core!" really means "here's some numbers that look overwhelmingly superior, in hopes that will distract you from the fact that it isn't." Apple went "retina" to end the pixel-count competition: if you can't see the pixels, you don't care how many there are. Apple refused to state RAM size for mobile devices from the beginning: user doesn't have an option, and rarely (if ever) notices the limit, so the actual memory size doesn't matter. Processor count & speed is irrelevant if it's used efficiently enough to practically outrun the competition. Sure, Apple does provide some specs. People are too used to seeing such numbers, despite few needing to see them IF the implementation is done right. People want options, so some specs are flexible (at a price). But remember that behind the scenes at retail, the devices options are labeled little more than "Good, Better, Best": most users don't want better numbers, they want superior performance with whatever it's got. Those gloating about size are likely less able to use it.
  - orkoden 12y ago
    Apples doesn't advertise clock rate or RAM size. You can't even find it on the tech specs pages. The most they do is tell you the chip's name.
  - avn2109 12y ago
    This is something I've been harping about for a long time. Apple is a _user experience_ company, not a hardware or software company (perhaps they're the only UX company out there). There's an old saw about the railroads getting killed by the tractor trailer in the 20th century because they thought they were in the railroad business, when in fact they were in the transportation business. This time, Apple knows exactly what business it's in, while the competition seems to have no idea (compare the highly-curated experience of shopping/buying/shipping/using an Apple product to the Android or Lenovo analogue).
rayiner 12y ago
The really interesting data point to me is the 6+'s 13.7 hours of WiFi browsing versus the LG G3's 8.8 hours. Both are 5.5" screens with ~3000 mAh batteries, but the iOS/A8 combo lasts more than 50% longer.
- Supermighty 12y ago
  The LG G3 has a 1440x2560 QHD screen. It takes more power to dive more pixels.
  - kllrnohj 12y ago
    So Android pushed 77% more pixels using only 50% more power? Sounds like Android is more efficient! Obviously power is more complex than just that, but seriously Android's reputation for being inefficient is really not justified due to things like this, where resolution differences are completely ignored.
    - tr0picana 12y ago
      A minor correction: The iPhone 6+ renders at 1242 x 2208 but scales it down to 1920 x 1080. So 30% more pixels at 50% more power?
      - bryanlarsen 12y ago
        It's the physical pixels that suck most of the power, so "77% more pixels" is more accurate. Certainly the GPU on the iPhone 6+ is going to take more power because it's rendering at 1242x2208 rather than 1920x1080, but that's a minor effect compared to the physical screen power draw.
    - rayiner 12y ago
      That presupposes that lighting up and drawing pixels is most if the overall power budget. Moreover, the biggest component of screen power usage is the backlight, which doesn't scale linearly with the number of pixels.
cevaris 12y ago
Shouldn't this included iPad too comparisons too, since it includes the Nvida shield? Else, the Nvida shield should probably not be up there.
- szatkus 12y ago
  Nvidia made quite interesting SoC, that's why they placed Shield in the comparision. iPad has only slightly boosted iPhone SoC.
gt565k 12y ago
I'm surprised no one mentioned the ability to use custom ROMs and kernels on android devices with optimized CPU governers and overclocking on demand and how that affects the phone's performance. Android stock branded phones are packed with bloatware from the carriers. This is something apple actually has a grip on due to how closed their platform is. I'm running c-rom with lean kernel on my Galaxy Note 3 and running just one of those benchmarking programs, I get results that are a lot better than what anandtech shows. Still not better than apple, but pretty close to them for a last generation phone. I'll try to run all of the benchmarks sometimes this weekeend and do a post.
- listic 12y ago
  Could you please elaborate what is "c-rom with lean kernel" and how can I run it? (on the original HTC mini). I bought it because I wanted a non-Android smartphone that's not huge and decently built, but I'm tired of HTC Sense.
  - mpthrapp 12y ago
    (S)he's talking about running a custom operating system on their phone. Check out xda-developers if you want a overview on the topic. I haven't actually done it myself, but they're the people to talk to. Side note, I'm confused, you bought an Android phone because you wanted a non-Android smart phone? HTC Sense is still Android, just with a custom skin.
    - gt565k 12y ago
      Sorry I can see how this is confusing, but it's basically what mpthrapp said. I've got a unbranded version of android suited for my phone with an optimized kernel (lean kernel). It runs a lot faster, the battery lasts longer, and I don't have to deal with 200+ bloatware apps on the phone... Here's the page for C-ROM. See if it's compatible with your device. http://www.c-rom.org/ http://www.c-rom.org/ lean kernel for note 3 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2488233 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2488233 Your best bet is to just get on xda-developers forums and go to your device's section.
joeblau 12y ago
Can someone explain where there is such a huge gap between the 6 and 6+ when it comes to the Onscreen GFXBench test?
- valley_guy_12 12y ago
  Presumably because the 6+ has a much larger screen.
  - ldrndll 12y ago
    Made even worse by the fact that it renders at 2208x1242 and then downsamples to 1920 × 1080.
frik 12y ago
OT: AnandTech founder Anand Shimpi retires from journalism to work at Apple: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/anandtech-founder-anand-shimpi-retires-from-journalism-to-work-at-apple/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/anandtech-founder-ana...
blinkingled 12y ago
To give you a faint idea of how meaningless battery benchmarks are vis-à-vis real life usage, here are results from Phone Arena - http://www.phonearena.com/news/All-bow-to-the-new-endurance-kings-Sony-Xperia-Z3-and-Z3-Compact-score-a-record-battery-life_id60922 http://www.phonearena.com/news/All-bow-to-the-new-endurance-... - 9+ hrs for Xperia Z3 and 6+ for iPhone 6+ which is lesser than the S5. "We measure battery life by running a custom web-script, designed to replicate the power consumption of typical real-life usage" In other words I would be very surprised if any of these benchmarks translate to anything close to the numbers they proclaim.
- saturdaysaint 12y ago
  Showing two different benchmarks doesn't actually prove that battery benchmarks are meaningless.
  - blinkingled 12y ago
    Well they are both web browsing battery life benchmarks. If loading different web pages shows 5+ hours of discrepancy then yes from a user standpoint they are precisely meaningless.
    - meepmorp 12y ago
      No, it might mean that one of the benchmarks is meaningful and the other is not. Or it might be that they test different scenarios and could be useful to different groups of users. What the discrepancy tells you is that there's something odd about the benchmarks that could stand to be better investigated/explained.
      - blinkingled 12y ago
        > there's something odd about the benchmarks You say odd, I say meaningless :)
        meepmorp 12y ago
nicpottier 12y ago
I was waiting for some independent battery tests and this kind of confirms what I suspected would happen. Apple is back to absolutely destroying Android on the battery front. Some might not remember, but the drive to bigger Android screens was actually mostly driven by battery life. Android has always been subpar in this critical respect, the first devices were absolutely terrible, I suspect primarily because Dalvik is nowhere near as efficient as cross-compiled objective C and the rather more restrictive background task management on iOS. iPhone 5's were holding their own and then some against the much larger battery Android devices, so now that they batteries are the same on the 6's there is no contest. Yes, bigger screens do eat more battery, but the ratio of battery/screen size actually favors bigger screens, ergo why tablets get incredible battery life. (and why the Note has always been a great battery performer) I've carried a Nexus since the very first one, but I think I might jump to a 6+, the advantages are too much to ignore. I'll wait to see what the Nexus X is first as I really love Android these days, but I sure would love that battery life and camera. Nice to see Apple put the screws down.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Osmium 12y ago
  Yeah, this would be all very well and good if Apple started shipping phones with larger batteries. The fact that battery life per mAh (may be) better on iOS than Android means nothing if Apple keeps on rejecting larger batteries in favour of thinness. I know a lot of people would much prefer a slightly thicker iPhone 6 (that didn't require the camera to protrude, for one) if it meant a larger battery.

85 points by srikar 12y ago

I'd like to see some PC-phone comparisons now that they're starting to approach parity. By my calculations, the new iPhone seems to be roughly as fast as a 3 - 4 year old Macbook Air.

bhartzer 12y ago

I don't do a lot of gaming on my phone or on a tablet, so seems to me that the best bet right now (for me) is an iPhone 6 Plus.

hocuspocus 12y ago

Do we know how Apple's Cyclone shows roughly 4x better IPC against Krait at Sunspider benchmark? Are the extra registers and bigger L1 enough to explain that?

Spittie 12y ago
My best guess is that the Sunspider benchmark like single-threaded performance, and Cyclone destroys Krait/Cortex here. As for why, Cyclone's core are bigger, wider compared to Krait/Cortex, and are Out Of Order. (This is a nice article on that: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/179473-apples-a7-cyclone-cpu-detailed-a-desktop-class-chip-that-has-more-in-common-with-haswell-than-krait http://www.extremetech.com/computing/179473-apples-a7-cyclon...)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rgonzales 12y ago

I think the real standout here is NVIDIA. Shield was such an interesting product from the very beginning, it's nice to see how it is actually holding up against some of the "big boys".

asendra 12y ago
To be fair, the Nvidia shield mentioned in these benchmarks is a 8" tablet, not a smartphone. I think k1 hasn't yet been shown in a smartphone form factor. Given the limitations caused by size, it's not really a fair comparison.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Especially considering that these devices are all thermally limited: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/SoC-throttling.0012-640x480.png http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/SoC-th...

jonchang 12y ago

I wonder if it's time to start scaling mobile benchmarks by the size of the device.

bryanlarsen 12y ago
Some benchmarks are already scaled by screen size. Those have on screen and off screen versions.
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
Doesn't the "offscreen" test do that? i.e. render something on an offscreen, fixed and uniform resolution on all devices? Although battery performance should probably be normalized to battery size / amperage, yeah. Bigger phones usually have the same resolution as their smaller siblings but larger battery capacity.
Igglyboo 12y ago
It would make sense, bigger device allows for larger die and more ram, battery, etc. Seems like bigger devices will usually squander their extra resources however and have similar performance to the smaller devices.
watty 12y ago
Split up tablet and phone benchmarks but scaling by size is silly. Is it device size? Screen size? Screen resolution? Weight?

Igglyboo 12y ago

Seems like Apple really knows what consumers want. I spend about 90% of my iPhone time in Safari/Chrome. Advanced 3D graphics are nice and all but I rarely take advantage of them, I'd expect that most users are the same.

jonknee 12y ago
The top apps include many graphic heavy games, your usage is most likely not typical (which should be fairly obvious considering what site you're on). Currently top grossing for the US: Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, Pandora, Game of War - Fire Age, Farm Heroes Saga.
- scott_s 12y ago
  You're assuming, however, that the top downloaded apps represent top phone usage. I have no data on it, but I doubt that's the case. Like Igglyboo, I suspect most users spend most of their phone battery on the "boring" stuff, like listening to music, looking at web pages and email. edit: I'd also like to point out that there are two interesting metrics here: time and battery usage. It's possible for me to spend the majority of my time on boring stuff, but the majority of my battery on non-boring stuff. I'm guessing, though (again, without data and purely based on my own biases) that most people spend most of their time and battery on the boring stuff.
- nmcfarl 12y ago
  I'm not certain there is a direct correlation between the apps that make the most money in the App Store, and the apps that people spend the most time in. It would mean that all the built in apps, and all the free apps in the App Store relatively unused, and that advertising models are a fools errand as no-one spends enough time in the apps. I suspect companies persuing these kinds of apps, including apple, are seeing enough usage to make a business case for their actions.
  - jonknee 12y ago
    Of the free apps in the US store right now are keyboards (new for iOS 8 and don't really count as "apps") and Facebook Messenger, iTunes U, Amazing Thief (game), The Maze Runner (game), Instagram, Facebook, Beach Buggy Racing (Game), etc. Games are extraordinarily popular on iOS. I see people gaming constantly on planes, trains, busses, etc.

dan1234 12y ago

There's a handy Reddit thread[0] with reports of actual "real world" usage. [0]http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2gzxx1/post_your_battery_stats_screenshots_when_your/ http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2gzxx1/post_your_batt...

mladenkovacevic 12y ago
I'm always confused by the terms "Usage" and "Standby". Between those two which is "Time off charger" and which one is "Screen Time"?
- vijaykiran 12y ago
  I think there's a pretty good explanation here: http://www.scottyloveless.com/ios-battery-life/ http://www.scottyloveless.com/ios-battery-life/
  - mladenkovacevic 12y ago
    Ok that explains it a little bit. So Standby time is basically "Time off Charger", and Usage is supposed to be "Screen on time"? Except I have a feeling that "Usage" includes any time when your phone is not sleeping (which would include not just the time when you have the screen on but also any time when the processor is doing stuff in the background). What draws me to that conclusion is the ratio of usage to standby time that some people in that thread have. I have a hard time believing that most people are staring at their screens for half of their waking life. I mean even if you didn't leave the house all day you'd still have to take your eyes off the thing to prepare food, urinate, put your clothes on.
    - shurcooL 12y ago
      I think that's exactly right.
    - arrrg 12y ago
      Yep, listening to podcasts (with the screen off), for example, is definitely “Usage”. I’m not quite sure how the phone counts background activity that doesn’t notify the user or require user interaction (e.g. Mail checking for new emails, …).

melling 12y ago

Wish they would include the iPhone 5 results. Most people keep a phone for two years.

jskonhovd 12y ago
You can run the benchmarks yourself! http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html
alkonaut 12y ago
Yeah. And 4 and 4s. I'm interested in what upgrading will give me, not really how it compares to other high end phones (not switching from iOS). I doubt many 5S users are upgrading to 6, but a lot of 4S and 5-users.
curun1r 12y ago
It's not convenient, but you can always go back to their 5s review to see the 5/5s difference. http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/5 http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review/5

mrfusion 12y ago

It seems odd they report 10 hours web browser battery life for the iPhone 5. I'd be lucky to get 1-2 hours of constant browsing.

josephlord 12y ago
They are using Wifi and pausing between page loads (so that fast phones don't load 4x as many pages and lose the test). On Wifi 10 hours sounds closer to my experience than 1-2 hours.
- mrfusion 12y ago
  My phone is 2.5 years old at this point. Maybe I've been losing battery capacity so gradually I've never noticed. That would be amazing to have 13 hours of browsing with a new phone. (as reported in the article)
  - josephlord 12y ago
    Mine is the same age. Note I haven't measured but but hour plus browsing sessions have a fairly negligible impact on the battery so I'm confident it would at least reach about 5 hours (in percentage terms closer to 10 hours than 1-2). When browsing on weak LTE the situation is different and 1-2 hours sounds very plausible. Maps/navigation can take big chunks out of the battery in a period of an hour or two and I need +60% before I set out on a 3 hour bike ride with Cyclemeter on.
  - dan1234 12y ago
    The iPhone 5 was only released 2 years ago (21 Sept 2012), yours can't possibly be 2.5 years old.
    - mrfusion 12y ago
      Ok, apparently I have a 4S. Maybe it's older than I thought.

ksk 12y ago

The A8 chip is "only" a dual-core and clocked at a relatively modest 1.4GHz. It's heartening to see it beat competing 2+GHz Quad-cores. To me, it looks like Apple is comfortable enough with their marketing strategy to stay away from the pointless GHz rat-race that exists in the Android world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth

ctdonath 12y ago
Methinks Apple has decided/realized that specs are a cop-out. Customers are, all too often, inundated with numbers not so much to prove how good the product is, but to conceal that it's not good enough. "Meh, the new iPhone has a mere 1.4GHz dual-core, but our product has a 2+GHz quad-core!" really means "here's some numbers that look overwhelmingly superior, in hopes that will distract you from the fact that it isn't." Apple went "retina" to end the pixel-count competition: if you can't see the pixels, you don't care how many there are. Apple refused to state RAM size for mobile devices from the beginning: user doesn't have an option, and rarely (if ever) notices the limit, so the actual memory size doesn't matter. Processor count & speed is irrelevant if it's used efficiently enough to practically outrun the competition. Sure, Apple does provide some specs. People are too used to seeing such numbers, despite few needing to see them IF the implementation is done right. People want options, so some specs are flexible (at a price). But remember that behind the scenes at retail, the devices options are labeled little more than "Good, Better, Best": most users don't want better numbers, they want superior performance with whatever it's got. Those gloating about size are likely less able to use it.
- orkoden 12y ago
  Apples doesn't advertise clock rate or RAM size. You can't even find it on the tech specs pages. The most they do is tell you the chip's name.
- avn2109 12y ago
  This is something I've been harping about for a long time. Apple is a _user experience_ company, not a hardware or software company (perhaps they're the only UX company out there). There's an old saw about the railroads getting killed by the tractor trailer in the 20th century because they thought they were in the railroad business, when in fact they were in the transportation business. This time, Apple knows exactly what business it's in, while the competition seems to have no idea (compare the highly-curated experience of shopping/buying/shipping/using an Apple product to the Android or Lenovo analogue).

rayiner 12y ago

The really interesting data point to me is the 6+'s 13.7 hours of WiFi browsing versus the LG G3's 8.8 hours. Both are 5.5" screens with ~3000 mAh batteries, but the iOS/A8 combo lasts more than 50% longer.

Supermighty 12y ago
The LG G3 has a 1440x2560 QHD screen. It takes more power to dive more pixels.
- kllrnohj 12y ago
  So Android pushed 77% more pixels using only 50% more power? Sounds like Android is more efficient! Obviously power is more complex than just that, but seriously Android's reputation for being inefficient is really not justified due to things like this, where resolution differences are completely ignored.
  - tr0picana 12y ago
    A minor correction: The iPhone 6+ renders at 1242 x 2208 but scales it down to 1920 x 1080. So 30% more pixels at 50% more power?
    - bryanlarsen 12y ago
      It's the physical pixels that suck most of the power, so "77% more pixels" is more accurate. Certainly the GPU on the iPhone 6+ is going to take more power because it's rendering at 1242x2208 rather than 1920x1080, but that's a minor effect compared to the physical screen power draw.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    That presupposes that lighting up and drawing pixels is most if the overall power budget. Moreover, the biggest component of screen power usage is the backlight, which doesn't scale linearly with the number of pixels.

cevaris 12y ago

Shouldn't this included iPad too comparisons too, since it includes the Nvida shield? Else, the Nvida shield should probably not be up there.

szatkus 12y ago
Nvidia made quite interesting SoC, that's why they placed Shield in the comparision. iPad has only slightly boosted iPhone SoC.

gt565k 12y ago

I'm surprised no one mentioned the ability to use custom ROMs and kernels on android devices with optimized CPU governers and overclocking on demand and how that affects the phone's performance. Android stock branded phones are packed with bloatware from the carriers. This is something apple actually has a grip on due to how closed their platform is. I'm running c-rom with lean kernel on my Galaxy Note 3 and running just one of those benchmarking programs, I get results that are a lot better than what anandtech shows. Still not better than apple, but pretty close to them for a last generation phone. I'll try to run all of the benchmarks sometimes this weekeend and do a post.

listic 12y ago
Could you please elaborate what is "c-rom with lean kernel" and how can I run it? (on the original HTC mini). I bought it because I wanted a non-Android smartphone that's not huge and decently built, but I'm tired of HTC Sense.
- mpthrapp 12y ago
  (S)he's talking about running a custom operating system on their phone. Check out xda-developers if you want a overview on the topic. I haven't actually done it myself, but they're the people to talk to. Side note, I'm confused, you bought an Android phone because you wanted a non-Android smart phone? HTC Sense is still Android, just with a custom skin.
  - gt565k 12y ago
    Sorry I can see how this is confusing, but it's basically what mpthrapp said. I've got a unbranded version of android suited for my phone with an optimized kernel (lean kernel). It runs a lot faster, the battery lasts longer, and I don't have to deal with 200+ bloatware apps on the phone... Here's the page for C-ROM. See if it's compatible with your device. http://www.c-rom.org/ http://www.c-rom.org/ lean kernel for note 3 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2488233 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2488233 Your best bet is to just get on xda-developers forums and go to your device's section.

joeblau 12y ago

Can someone explain where there is such a huge gap between the 6 and 6+ when it comes to the Onscreen GFXBench test?

valley_guy_12 12y ago
Presumably because the 6+ has a much larger screen.
- ldrndll 12y ago
  Made even worse by the fact that it renders at 2208x1242 and then downsamples to 1920 × 1080.

frik 12y ago

OT: AnandTech founder Anand Shimpi retires from journalism to work at Apple: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/anandtech-founder-anand-shimpi-retires-from-journalism-to-work-at-apple/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/anandtech-founder-ana...

blinkingled 12y ago

To give you a faint idea of how meaningless battery benchmarks are vis-à-vis real life usage, here are results from Phone Arena - http://www.phonearena.com/news/All-bow-to-the-new-endurance-kings-Sony-Xperia-Z3-and-Z3-Compact-score-a-record-battery-life_id60922 http://www.phonearena.com/news/All-bow-to-the-new-endurance-... - 9+ hrs for Xperia Z3 and 6+ for iPhone 6+ which is lesser than the S5. "We measure battery life by running a custom web-script, designed to replicate the power consumption of typical real-life usage" In other words I would be very surprised if any of these benchmarks translate to anything close to the numbers they proclaim.

saturdaysaint 12y ago
Showing two different benchmarks doesn't actually prove that battery benchmarks are meaningless.
- blinkingled 12y ago
  Well they are both web browsing battery life benchmarks. If loading different web pages shows 5+ hours of discrepancy then yes from a user standpoint they are precisely meaningless.
  - meepmorp 12y ago
    No, it might mean that one of the benchmarks is meaningful and the other is not. Or it might be that they test different scenarios and could be useful to different groups of users. What the discrepancy tells you is that there's something odd about the benchmarks that could stand to be better investigated/explained.
    - blinkingled 12y ago
      > there's something odd about the benchmarks You say odd, I say meaningless :)
      - meepmorp 12y ago

nicpottier 12y ago

I was waiting for some independent battery tests and this kind of confirms what I suspected would happen. Apple is back to absolutely destroying Android on the battery front. Some might not remember, but the drive to bigger Android screens was actually mostly driven by battery life. Android has always been subpar in this critical respect, the first devices were absolutely terrible, I suspect primarily because Dalvik is nowhere near as efficient as cross-compiled objective C and the rather more restrictive background task management on iOS. iPhone 5's were holding their own and then some against the much larger battery Android devices, so now that they batteries are the same on the 6's there is no contest. Yes, bigger screens do eat more battery, but the ratio of battery/screen size actually favors bigger screens, ergo why tablets get incredible battery life. (and why the Note has always been a great battery performer) I've carried a Nexus since the very first one, but I think I might jump to a 6+, the advantages are too much to ignore. I'll wait to see what the Nexus X is first as I really love Android these days, but I sure would love that battery life and camera. Nice to see Apple put the screws down.

deleted 12y ago
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Osmium 12y ago
Yeah, this would be all very well and good if Apple started shipping phones with larger batteries. The fact that battery life per mAh (may be) better on iOS than Android means nothing if Apple keeps on rejecting larger batteries in favour of thinness. I know a lot of people would much prefer a slightly thicker iPhone 6 (that didn't require the camera to protrude, for one) if it meant a larger battery.