12-inch MacBook review

Apple's latest laptop is simply called the MacBook. 

Actually, I suppose, you're going to see everybody refer to it as "the new MacBook" for a little while, but that's just temporary. The name is a signal. Apple could have called it the MacBook Air 12-inch or the MacBook Slim or any number of other things. But instead, it’s the MacBook. That has to mean something.

You are really, really going to want this laptop, even though it's relatively expensive, starting at $1,299. It’s easily the most impressive laptop I’ve seen since the original MacBook Air. It’s almost unbelievable in every regard. How did Apple make it so thin? What dark magicks make this trackpad work? Is it really going to be fast enough? Why is there only one port? Every one of those questions has an interesting answer, and the mere fact that a laptop can still engender this much intrigue in 2015 is remarkable.

After using this tiny little wonder of a computer for a little over a week, I have a pretty strong guess about what the name means. It’s called the MacBook because Apple sees it as the Platonic ideal of what a laptop should be. It’s what Apple believes all laptops should eventually become.

But if you know anything about Platonic ideals, you know that there's a big difference between the ideal and the reality. And so the big question for this tiny new MacBook is simple: is the reality anywhere close to the ideal? 

The MacBook is what happens when the iPad Air decides to up and grow a keyboard, hinge, and trackpad. It's a thin, compact, and light sliver of a machine with no loose pieces and no unconsidered lines. The same precision we've seen on Apple's phones and tablets has been applied here — it's genuinely a level above any other laptop Apple has ever made, to say nothing of other hardware makers.

It is, in a word, beautiful.

A THIN MACHINE WITH NO LOOSE PIECES AND NO UNCONSIDERED LINES

It's almost impossibly thin, measuring just over 13mm at its thickest point. It's even more impossibly light, weighing just over two pounds. That's about a full pound less than the 13-inch MacBook Air and a third of a pound less than the 11-inch Air. And that weight is perfectly distributed across the deck of the laptop and the screen. It's so well-balanced that it feels lighter than it actually is.

People who use the 11-inch Air are going to feel right at home, and actually people who use the 13-inch Air will, too. It just feels like the ideal size for a small laptop, perfectly fitted to a full-sized keyboard and not a whit bigger. Apple also redesigned the hinge so that it is made of metal, increased the size of the trackpad, and moved the speakers (which are reasonably loud, but obviously lack anything resembling bass) up above the keyboard.

It comes in gold, silver, and space gray. I got a gold review unit because, well, why not? I think it totally works. It's much more restrained in person than you might think, but honestly I'd probably end up choosing the space gray model.

To pull off this design, Apple's marketing video will tell you that it required a lot of inventions. The keyboard, trackpad, screen, and batteries all needed to be redone to make the MacBook as thin as it is. And in every one of those cases, you can safely believe the hype. But the flip side of invention is compromise, and unfortunately there's enough of that here that I have to leaven the enthusiasm I've been expressing thus far with a warning: it's not all wonderful. Invention and compromise.

But let's stick with the inventions for now, because they truly are remarkable. It starts with the keyboard, which is shallower than what you might be used to. Underneath each key is a butterfly mechanism, a "steel dome" that registers your keystrokes, and an individual backlight for every single key.

At first, I hated it. It felt weird to have each button move so little when I pressed down on it. But it didn't take long at all for me to change my mind. The combination of all those new parts meant that the essential friction and "clack" that make up any great keyboard is still here, just different than what I was used to. I can bang away on this thing or type more softly, and both feel completely satisfying. The only real hassles are the redesigned up and down arrow keys: they're entirely too small.

The next thing is the screen, a 236 ppi Retina display that's 2304 x 1440 pixels. The invention here is that it's thinner and brighter thanks to rearranged electronics inside, and it's also more energy efficient. The thinner screen also means that the Apple logo on the back of the laptop no longer lights up, if that's something you care about. But ignore those specs and just look at it: it simply puts the screen on the MacBook Air to shame.

THE REDESIGNED KEYBOARD WILL GROW ON YOU

It's sharp and bright, and Apple also switched the bezels to black to match the rest of the Retina MacBook lineup. Those bezels are thin, too, so the combination makes the screen feel really big. You can set the resolution all the way up to 1440 x 900, so it's effectively giving you the same real estate as the 13-inch MacBook Air. You can’t crank it up to the full resolution, but you wouldn’t want to anyway, since it would make everything way too small.

The Force Touch Trackpad feels like an impossible object. It has tiny pads that detect pressure, and then an electromagnet inside that simulates the feel of a click when you press down. So when the laptop is off, you feel nothing. When it's on, click. It's all in service of thinness — and some clever software features.

You can set the click strength in settings and also turn on a bunch of unique features for it in OS X. Force clicking (as it's called) lets you open up web page previews on links or definitions for words. You can also step through fast-forward speeds on videos and even feel some haptic feedback in a select few apps, like iMovie. Honestly, none of those software tricks felt very intuitive to me. But the trackpad itself felt completely natural, easily up to Apple's standards. In fact, it feels better than normal for a MacBook, since you can now click on the very top of it as easily as the bottom.

THE FORCE TOUCH TRACKPAD FEELS LIKE AN IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT

There are other inventions, too. Apple redesigned its batteries to be tiered, so they can cram more of them into the MacBook. The result is a claimed nine hours of battery life — a claim that's notably close to my experience. In our relatively light test, which reloads websites once a minute, this MacBook actually beat Apple's claims by about an hour or so. But when you're putting it under stress, you'll get a bit less, probably closer to eight hours.

But here's where the inventions, while impressive, begin to feel more like those compromises. Apple created an all new, tiny little circuit board to house all the microchips that power the MacBook. It means that it doesn't need a fan at all, but it also means that using the kind of processor we're used to on modern laptops isn't really tenable.

Instead, the processor on the MacBook is an Intel Core M, clocked at 1.1GHz but with a Turbo Boost mode that can crank it up to more than twice as fast (and there are other, more expensive variants that can go even faster). Hence the compromises: the MacBook benchmarks at about the same level as a four-year-old MacBook Air. That sounds dire, but in my experience it doesn't feel anywhere near that slow — mostly.

FAST ENOUGH FOR MOST COMMON TASKS, BUT IT GETS WARM IF YOU PUSH IT

Basically, if you do anything that’s going to really tax the processor, this laptop probably isn't going to cut it for you. In that sense it's actually kind of like a Chromebook. It's fast enough for 70 percent of what I do, but a little slower than what I'm used to. For about 20 percent of what I do — mostly photo editing — it works but requires patience. But it's the last 10 percent that's hard: video editing, really big iPhoto libraries, basically anything processor-intensive can get rough.

I'll also say that the Chrome browser is kind of the perfect app to show where the line is between "good enough" and "kind of slow." Chrome has really become something of a resource hog for me lately. It’s not a problem most of the time, but load up enough tabs, and any computer will start to chug. On my MacBook Air, that happens at around 20 tabs. On the new MacBook, it’s about half that.

Safari runs much better, but the point is that the headroom for apps that hog resources is much smaller than what I'm used to. And in any case, the fact that it's fanless means that the laptop gets warm. I wouldn't say hot, but it’s definitely riding that line of comfort for bare legs. Fortunately, the heat is localized to where that processor cranking into turbo boost is located: on the bottom, near the back.

The tiny board, the fanless design, the fact that it can power this Retina display at all — all these inventions are impressive. But being impressed and being able to get work done are not the same thing. It's a compromise I can't promise you is okay unless you're sure you're not going to push a machine beyond the basics and can stand to wait for those times when you need to.

Which leads me to the last invention / compromise: the new MacBook has a new port, called USB Type-C. It's also the only port besides the headphone jack. You use it for power and for connecting your phone, monitor, printer, camera, or whatever else you might have. And because it's a brand new kind of plug, you will need adapters for all of those things.

Say you want to charge your computer, plug in your iPhone, and plug in an external monitor. That's a totally natural thing to want to do! To pull it off, you are going to need to have the right dongle — and you’re going to need to buy it, too, since they don’t come in the box. They're just beginning to come on the market now, and I’m hopeful they’ll be both cheap and plentiful, but so far I've only been able to use the basic ones. So, just by way of example, right now I can't plug my Apple MacBook into my Apple Cinema Display because I don’t have a dongle with Display Port on it.

Again, this is an invention and a compromise, and it's one that I'm actually a little torn on. USB Type-C has a legitimate chance of being the One Connector To Rule Them All. Google and Nokia are already using it, other phone and laptop manufacturers are on board, and from a technical standpoint it's a really great plug. It's strong, it’s reversible, it's fast from both a data and power perspective, and it's not proprietary. I charged the new MacBook with Google's power adapter. Heck, I charged the new MacBook off one of those battery bricks that's meant to power an iPad.

Sure, I miss the safety of the MagSafe adapter, but being able to buy any number of chargers and adapters from whomever makes the cheapest or best ones is a big deal — and worth the tradeoff. Or will be, once USB Type-C takes hold.

Apple says that it designed the MacBook with the idea that soon you'll be able to connect everything wirelessly anyway. The iPhone can sync wirelessly or use AirDrop, lots of cameras support Wi-Fi, etc, etc. That all sounds nice, but I can tell you from painful experience that the dream of wireless peripherals is usually more like a waking nightmare of confusing sync settings, delays, and frustration. The MacBook supports Bluetooth 4.0 and an alphabet of Wi-Fi standards, but that's not enough, not yet.

Talking to other Verge staffers about it, I joked that I'm looking forward to "Livin' La Vida Dongle." That's almost true! When it comes down to it, I mostly plug in power and only rarely need to use an SD card reader or plug in some other USB device. But when I need it, I need it, and having to carry a rat's nest of adapters and cables puts a huge damper on the portability of this machine.

A lot of people remember the moment when Steve Jobs pulled the original MacBook Air out of that interoffice memo envelope. It was jaw-dropping. But it's easy to forget that the very first MacBook Air had problems — some of the very same problems as this new MacBook: not enough ports, slow, expensive. But the next version became the MacBook Air you know now, the one everybody either uses or copies. The one that changed laptops for five years.

This new MacBook is the future. All laptops are going to be like this someday: with ridiculously good screens, no fans, lasting all day. Just like the original MacBook Air defined a generation of competitors, this new MacBook will do the same. It, or something inspired by it, is what you'll be using in two or three years. It's that good.

ALL LAPTOPS ARE GOING TO BE LIKE THIS SOMEDAY 

Here's a crazy surprise I didn't expect: my 13-inch MacBook Air felt big and clunky after I went back to it. And make no mistake, the MacBook Air is itself a wonder of engineering. Yet compared to the new MacBook it felt like a heavy, kind of ugly throwback with a mediocre screen. I really didn't want to go back to that Air.

But I still went back.

You see, the problem with the future is that it isn't here yet. Instead we live in the now, and the now doesn't have the ecosystem of adapters and wireless peripherals I need to use this laptop with its single port. The now doesn't have the right processor to power through the apps I need without ruining battery life. And right now, this laptop is far from cheap at $1,299.

But if history is any guide, all of those problems will go away — and more quickly than you probably expect. When they do, I'll be using this MacBook. The MacBook. Hurry up, future. Hurry the hell up.

Photography by Sean O'Kane

Apple MacBook (2015)

8.4 VERGE SCORE

GOOD STUFF

• Incredibly thin
• Beautiful Retina display
• Great keyboard

BAD STUFF

• Processor-intensive tasks are slow
• Laptop gets warm
• Only one port for everything

THE BREAKDOWN

More times than not, the Verge score is based on the average of the subscores below. However, since this is a non-weighted average, we reserve the right to tweak the overall score if we feel it doesn't reflect our overall assessment and price of the product. Read more about how we test and rate products.

• DESIGN10
• KEYBOARD9
• TOUCHPAD10
• DISPLAY10
• PERFORMANCE6
• HEAT / NOISE7
• BATTERY LIFE8
• SOFTWARE9

iPhone 6s and 6s Plus review: More than just a refresh

Some people look a little unkindly on the so-called "S" years -- those years when Apple updates the iPhone, but doesn't change how it looks, and then sells that while secretly working on something flashier that will debut 12 months later. I don't think that's exactly fair. Those "S" years are when Apple adds some of its most useful features. Siri? Touch ID? Both valuable additions to the iPhone platform that have since grown in importance. This year we get 3D Touch, a potentially awesome way to interact with iPhones. The thing is, a device's worth isn't just tied up in one feature: It's about how all those moving parts work together. That's why the new 6s and 6s Plus (starting at $649 and $749, respectively, for 16GB models) are such great phones. The combination of much-improved hardware and some polished software makes this year's release far more than just a modest refresh.

Gallery: Meet the iPhone 6s family | 13 Photos

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Pros

• 3D Touch is a smart, helpful addition
• First-rate performance
• Improved cameras
• Touch ID is faster and more accurate

 

Cons

• Lacks optical image stabilization
• Live Photos are hit-or-miss
• Base model still only has 16GB of storage
• Touch ID can be overly sensitive

Summary

The iPhone 6s keeps the same design as the iPhone 6, but packs better cameras, a snappier processor and 3D Touch, a smart new way to get things done in fewer steps. Beyond that, the combination of iOS 9 and some well-built hardware help makes the 6s one of the best iPhones ever made... even if we wish it had some of the 6s Plus' niceties.

Pros

• 3D Touch is a smart, helpful addition
• First-rate performance
• Touch ID is faster and more accurate
• Great camera helped by optical image stabilization
• Solid battery life

 

Cons

• Live Photos are hit-or-miss
• Base model still only has 16GB of storage
• Touch ID can be overly sensitive
• Can be hard to use with one hand

Summary

The iPhone 6s Plus has 3D Touch, iOS 9, a pair of improved cameras and the powerful A9 chipset, just like its smaller sibling. A long-lasting battery and optical image stabilization for its 12-megapixel rear camera help give the iPhone 6s Plus a slight edge over the regular 6s, although we wish it were a little easier to hold.

Hardware

No, your eyes don't deceive you: The 6s and 6s Plus look nearly identical to last year's models, save for a new rose gold color option that oscillates between "vaguely lavender" and "shiny new penny" depending on the light. The sleek, rounded aesthetic might not raise as many eyebrows as it did last year, but it's still one of my favorite iPhone designs. Aside from the pink color option, the other changes aren't particularly noticeable. Both phones are now made from 7000-series aluminum, an alloy used in the aerospace industry that, when compared to last year's phones, makes for a sturdier but similarly lightweight design. The regulatory icons that used to live on the iPhone's back have been removed too, leaving a teensy "S" logo to let the world know you've upgraded.

Gallery: iPhone 6s review | 13 Photos

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Meanwhile, we're still left with the same 16GB, 64GB and 128GB storage options as last year, and you're almost certainly going to want one of the latter two. I was hoping against hope Apple would finally give the 16GB model the heave-ho and raise the baseline to 32GB of space. That was clearly silly of me. Economies of scale aside, iOS 9's smaller footprint and new developer tools like app slicing make the 16GB iPhone a little easier to make do with, though the inclusion of an upgraded 12-megapixel camera, 4K video shooting and animated Live Photos (which are turned on by default) means some will have a tough time keeping free space available.

Gallery: iPhone 6s Plus review | 17 Photos

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As ever, the Touch ID fingerprint sensor lives in the iPhone's home button, but this year's module is a clear improvement: Apple claims it can pick up your fingerprints up to twice as fast as before. I can't make out exactly what the speed multiple is here, but Touch ID really is blazing fast now, and I can't remember the last time it didn't work on the first try, either. In fact, it's actually so fast that I've had to change some of my daily behaviors as a result. You see, I used to be one of those people who tapped on the home button to check the time or change tracks while I was in my car (yes, dangerous, sorry). With the 6s and 6s Plus, that doesn't fly anymore: Touch ID picks up all but the quickest home-button taps.

As it happens, both phones are a touch thicker and heavier than before, but they're still comfortable to hold, and the change in thickness specifically is so subtle that it's nearly imperceptible. As for the weight, the 6s and 6s Plus do indeed feel noticeably weightier: The 6s weighs in at 143 grams, up from 129, while the bigger 6s Plus now comes in at 192 grams, up from 172. Not that that's a bad thing. All told, this is one of the few times an iPhone has gotten beefier (the 4s was slightly heavier than the 4), and I'm actually quite pleased about it. At some point, there has to be a lower limit to how thin a phone can get and still be comfortable to use. I'd much rather see companies abandon that ceaseless march toward cartoonishly thin designs and instead work to make better use of the sizes they've already achieved. Bigger batteries, anyone?

Speaking of the sort, the cells in these new models are actually slightly smaller than they were before: 1,715mAh in the 6s and 2,750mAh in the 6s Plus. I'll delve more into battery life a little later (spoiler alert: It hasn't really changed), but recent teardowns seem to reveal why we've gotten a bit of a downgrade this year. In short, you have that new 3D Touch screen to blame. To give you a little background, the display crams 96 pressure sensors into the backlight layer of the phones' Retina HD displays, along with a Taptic Engine that provides some subtle vibrations when you bear down on the screen. Turns out, the engine took up some extra room near the phones' bottom edges, just under the spot where the battery sits. For now, the time-savings you get from using 3D Touch gestures feels worth the slightly smaller batteries, but hopefully Apple will eventually figure out how to shrink the necessary components so that it doesn't have to compromise on battery size.

A new display, and a new way to touch it

At first glance, you probably wouldn't notice anything different about the IPS screens on the 6s and 6s Plus. After all, they're the same size as before (4.7 inches and 5.5 inches, respectively) with the same pixel density (326 ppi, or 401 ppi on the Plus). You won't even notice the improved glass covering them until you drop it (please don't). The eagle-eyed among you might catch that both screens are a touch brighter with slightly better color reproduction. There is, of course, something much more important at play here. It's called 3D Touch, and it's the biggest change in how we interact with iPhones since Siri.

Let's start with the broad strokes: If you press your finger down on, say, an app icon, you'll get a small menu of quick actions that you'd usually have to be inside the app to use. You'll also feel a brief vibration from the Taptic Engine as a sort of tactile "thumbs up." Like any new behavior, applying force to your iPhone's screen will take getting used to. The whole thing is made a little trickier by the fact that it's initially easy to mix up a 3D Touch and a long-press (like the one used to rearrange your app icons). It didn't take more than a day or two for my muscle memory to learn the amount of pressure needed to make 3D Touch work, but hey -- your mileage may vary.

Those 96 3D Touch sensors can also take precise measurements as you push down and release. Imagine, for instance, playing a racing game and being able to press the screen to accelerate past the chump who just whiffed while taking a corner. If that's the future of smartphones, bring it on.

What's more, there's an entirely new vocabulary around this 3D Touch screen. Pressing down to preview something in a little pop-up window -- be it a web link, or an address someone texted you -- is what Apple calls "peeking." Apply just a bit more pressure and the phone will bring up the usual, full-screen app view, in this case a Safari window or a location in Apple Maps. Congratulations, you just "popped" something. You can't use all the same 3D Touch actions if you're using an iPhone 6s Plus in landscape mode. Pressing down on app icons still brings up the menus you'd expect them to -- as evidenced by the GIF above -- but you can't peek/pop addresses or hyperlinks in Messages and Mail while the phone is sideways.

Apple's already laid out guidelines about how developers should implement 3D Touch, and they're basically centered on one key idea: 3D Touch is about helping users do things faster. So far, the vast majority of apps don't yet support 3D Touch, but the ones that do take different approaches as to what you can peek at. Some, like Twitter and Instagram, let you press down on their app icons to bring up those Quick Actions menus for near-instantaneous tweeting and photo sharing. Others, like Dropbox, offer previews of your files when you long-press their filenames in a list, but there's no app icon interaction. OpenTable takes sort of a hybrid approach -- you'll get both an app icon menu and the ability to peek at restaurants' locations in Maps as you're scrolling through the culinary options.

This all might sound complex, but trust me: It's not. Once more developers get on board, people will be able to zip around their home screens and just do things, as opposed to constantly jumping in and out of apps. It's also a tremendously useful tool for getting quick bits of context -- why yes, I would love to see a map of that sweet poutinerie in Berkeley, thanks very much.

After I got used to using 3D Touch, going back to the plain screen on my iPhone 6 was almost painful. Heck, even if you use the 6s and 6s Plus full-time, most developers haven't had the chance to build 3D Touch support into their apps yet. I can't tell you the number of times I was reading something in a non-supported app like Twitter, and pressed my thumb down on a link only to have nothing happen. Whoops! The mild twinge of annoyance I felt every time that happened speaks to how powerful 3D Touch is: It might seem like a gimmick at first, but it quickly became a feature I wanted to use all the time.

Software

I've already penned a few thousand words on iOS 9, and its focus on cohesiveness and efficiency makes a great match for the new iPhones. Most of the software tweaks on the 6s and 6s Plus are centered on those lovely little 3D Touch interactions, but there's one more trick that's currently only available on these things. Jump into Siri's settings and you'll find that you can now enable "Hey Siri" -- Apple's always-on listening mode -- to work even when you're not connected to a power source. The feature launched with iOS 9 just a few weeks back, but it works best with the new iPhones' more efficient M9 co-processor helping out under the hood. Weird as it sounds, I've taken to just talking to her sometimes when I want to listen to some Capital Cities in Apple Music, add yet another event to my stupid-packed calendar or turn on Airplane Mode when it's time for some shut-eye.

What's more, one of my favorite features from recent iPads has reached the new iPhones: 3D-Touching the keyboard while pecking out a text turns it into a trackpad for precise placement of the cursor when an inevitable typo pops up. If you lump in these tweaks with all the other thoughtful design changes in iOS 9, you're left with a tightly integrated package that tries to give us the apps and info we want at just the right time.

Camera and Live Photos

iPhones account for a huge chunk of the photos taken every day, so it's no surprise that Apple takes this camera business seriously. Thankfully, after several years, Apple finally traded in its 8-megapixel sensor in favor of a 12-megapixel main camera. Naturally, it's actually not so much the higher resolution that matters; it's all the other, more technical bits that should help improve photo quality. The folks in Cupertino went for smaller, more densely packed pixels (1.22µ, down from 1.5µ in the iPhone 6) that make for higher-resolution shots... with the added potential for more noise.

That's where Apple's "deep trench isolation" comes in: The company managed to separate the sensor's photodiodes to keep incoming photons from introducing interference into surrounding diodes. You don't really need to worry about that, though: It basically just means your photos should come out nice and crisp. Pair all that with a five-element lens and a familiar f/2.2 aperture and we've got ourselves another serious camera contender. 

Gallery: iPhone 6s sample images | 45 Photos

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Right, so how do photos actually look? Pretty great. Colors look nicely saturated, but naturally so, while the standard Photo mode handles dynamic range and exposure better than I expected. This becomes especially apparent in landscape shots; neither the 6s nor 6s Plus blew out the sky on bright days, which made for some great shots of Toronto's famous Honest Ed's superstore. Once you get a little closer to your subject, though, things start to go slightly awry. Just about all of the photos I shot using the 6s and 6s Plus's main cameras were crisp with clear color separation, but zooming in didn't reveal much more detail than in photos I took with the iPhone 6. That's not to say the 6s' photos were worse than ones taken with last year's iPhone; they just weren't always the dramatic leap forward I was hoping for.

Photos taken with the iPhone 6s Plus are, in most cases, on par with those taken on the regular 6s, but it does fare a little better in low-light situations thanks to its optical image stabilization. Those of you with really steady hands might not notice as much of a difference, but it came in handy when shooting video. Also on the plus side, the front-facing FaceTime camera has also received a long-overdue upgrade to a 5-megapixel sensor. It should shock absolutely no one that selfies came out crisper and more natural looking, and the software-based screen flash does a respectable job lighting up faces in bars.

As for video, the 6s and 6s Plus can shoot in 4K -- not that most people have 4K-ready screens in their homes yet. The resulting footage is remarkably sharp, with colors that were more or less true to life. Of course, all of this comes at a price: 4K video will eat up your free space in a hurry if you let it, which is why Apple didn't bother setting it as the default recording quality.

What is enabled by default, however, is the Live Photos feature. You've probably seen the demos already; when you snap a photo, the camera captures just a little audio and video before and after the shot is taken -- much like the Living Images feature found on recent Lumia phones. The end result is a neat, gimmicky way to capture enhanced pictures. They're evocative at best and sort of lame at worst, but artsy types will surely get a kick out of concocting cool Live Photo scenarios and sharing them to and fro. Remember, Live Photos are shareable between anyone running Apple's latest phone, watch or computer operating systems, so they need not languish alone on your 6s. They'll quickly spring to life as you thumb through your Camera Roll, and you can set them as Live Wallpapers too -- just apply a quick 3D Touch to run through the animations on your lockscreen.

All told, then, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have great cameras. And yes, that's "cameras" as in plural. Here's the rub, though: The competition hasn't exactly been sitting on their haunches these past few years, and devices like the Galaxy S6 line and Motorola's Moto X Pure edition are powerful pocket cameras in their own right. Are these new iPhones definitively the best mobile cameras on the market? No, but they're very strong options that stack up nicely against the rest of the greats. We're all better off for the competition.

Performance and battery life

A new kind of touchscreen and some upgraded cameras are one thing, but what about the silicon running under the hood? This year, we've got a new 64-bit A9 chipset thrumming away inside both the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, which, according to some benchmarking tools, appear to be made up of dual 1.8GHz Typhoon CPU cores, the GPU and the updated M9 co-processor. Apple never comments publicly about how much RAM its phones have, but recent teardowns show that the new iPhones have 2GB, just like the most recent iPad Air and Mini. All together, that's the biggest performance increase from one generation to another that we've seen in a while, and it shows.

I spent most of my time testing the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus by restoring them from recent backups of an iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and then using them side by side. The difference is obvious: Launching apps, firing up webpages and multitasking were all noticeably smoother on the newer iPhones. This performance gap can still vary a bit; the older iPhones would occasionally get close to 6s speed, but they never fully caught up. The benchmark table below paints a pretty good picture of just how much better the 6s and 6s Plus are at handling graphically intensive tasks like playing games. No dropped frames, no stuttering, no jankiness -- the 6s and the 6s Plus were the clear winners.

	IPHONE 6S	IPHONE 6S PLUS	IPHONE 6	IPHONE 6 PLUS
3DMark Unlimited IS	24,601	27,542	16,689	17,902
Geekbench 3 (multi-thread)	4,427	4,289	2,885	2,803
Basemark OS II	2,354	2,428	1,441	1,520
SunSpider 1.0.2 (ms)	230	220	351	388
SunSpider: Lower scores are better

More horsepower plus smaller batteries usually only means bad news, but the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus fared surprisingly well in our standard rundown tests. With screen brightness set to 50 percent and a video looping indefinitely with WiFi on and connected, the 6s hung in for 10 hours and 4 minutes, just short of the 10 hours and 19 minutes we saw on last year's iPhone 6. Meanwhile, the 6s Plus and its bigger battery managed to eke out 12 hours and 37 minutes, narrowly besting its predecessor. Frankly, I wasn't expecting either iPhone to match last year's results, but whatever Apple's doing with its silicon sure seems to be working.

You're probably not spending over 10 hours a day watching the same video over and over on your phone, though, and thankfully the iPhones do a great job keeping up with real-world demands too. In my case, a typical day of use consists of horsing around on social networks, firing off messages in Slack and Outlook, intermittent voice calls and the occasional bathroom break playing Pokémon Shuffle. With that kind of use, the iPhone 6s usually made it through an 11-hour workday with 15 or 20 percent battery life to spare, at which point I fired up Low Power Mode for another hour or two before plugging it in. if you're a bit more demanding or simply can't stand the idea of being tethered to an outlet, you might want to go in for the 6s Plus: I routinely was able to squeeze out 18 hours of use on a charge.

The competition

If you're on the prowl for a new smartphone and consider yourself platform agnostic, Samsung's Galaxy S6 line would be a good place to start. Samsung shares Apple's fondness for sleek, metal-and-glass designs, and both the 5.1-inch S6 and curved-screen S6 Edge pack some of the fastest silicon I've ever seen in an Android handset. Both phones are also comfortable to hold despite being bigger than the iPhone 6s. And if comfort and big screens are your concern, there's a good chance the Galaxy Note 5's curvaceous back will fit your palm better than the iPhone 6s Plus.

Then, of course, we've got some big-name options that aren't even available yet. There's a new pair of Nexus phones -- the 5X ($379) and the 6P ($499) -- that each offer potent horsepower at a reasonable price. Microsoft's eager to prove it's still in the smartphone game too, and is holding a keynote next week where it's probably going to announce the first high-end Lumia phones we've seen in ages. There's no word on price, unfortunately, and none of these options are likely to sway ardent Apple fans, but people willing to jump ship are about to have a lot great choices on their hands.

Wrap-up

It's easy to say that these are the best iPhones Apple has ever made, but that's true every year. Like I said before, a device's worth isn't tied directly to a single feature: The important thing is how all of its components and design flourishes and features and interaction elements fit together as a unified whole. The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus nail it -- mostly. They're great phones: well-built, well thought-out and brimming with potential. So, let's cap this off with a little buying advice. If you have an iPhone 5s and are itching to turn it in, now's the time. If you're an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus owner, this is a worthy upgrade, but no one will fault you for waiting another year. If you want the best iPhone you can buy right now (and don't mind a bigger device), you want the iPhone 6s Plus. And if you're tired of everyone insisting that big phones are the future and asking "What's wrong with you; why don't you have one yet?" buy a 6s and tell them to buzz off.

All product photos by Will Lipman. James Trew contributed camera samples.