Ever since the iPhone 3G was released in 2008, Apple has followed a pattern in which the external design of the iPhone changes in one year, and then the following year Apple releases an "s" model with the same design but major new features under the hood. Thus, we saw the iPhone 3G in 2008 followed by the faster iPhone 3GS in 2009. The iPhone 4 was released in 2010, and in 2011 the iPhone 4S added Siri. The iPhone 5 came out in 2012, and then in 2013 the iPhone 5s added Touch ID. Last year we saw the iPhone 6, and this past Friday Apple started selling the iPhone 6s. Once again, it is the same design as the prior model plus a major new feature, and this year that new feature is 3D Touch. It's a great feature, and for many lawyers could prove to be more useful than Siri or Touch ID. And of course there are other new features as well. Here are my thoughts on the new iPhone 6s
Back when the iPhone was introduced in 2007, the major new feature was the touchscreen. Instead of BlackBerry and Palm Treo smartphones that had a small square screen with half of the front devoted to a tiny keyboard, the iPhone innovation was to have a much larger screen that could be touched, and we all learned motions like tap, swipe to scroll, pinch to zoom, etc. Those features were innovative for a smartphone back in 2007, and were subsequently copied by all other smartphone manufacturers.
3D Touch is the biggest improvement to interacting with a screen since the iPhone was first introduced in 2007. And it works great. Yes, you can still tap just like you could before, such as tap an app icon to open the app. But now you can also press a little harder on the icon to perform a different function. It is very easy to know how hard to press because Apple uses haptic feedback, much like the Apple Watch, so that you feel a minor vibration which feels almost like a click. The name 3D Touch is perfect because it really is like Apple has added a third dimension, giving you the ability to press into a screen in addition to the old tap or swipe left, right, up, or down.
Right now, for the most part, two types of things can happen when you use 3D Touch. If you press on an app icon, you see a pop-up Quick Action menu with a few common actions. Instead of tapping on the Messages app icon and then tapping at the top left to see all of your sets of messages and then tapping on Bob's name so that you can get into your message conversation with Bob, now just press on the app icon and select Bob from the Quick Action menu. Or press on the Mail icon and select New Message or Search from the Quick Action menu. Or press on the Camera icon and jump right to recording video. It's a little thing that saves you time, and once you get used to it, you'll really miss not having it on your iPad. It reminds me of the right click function using a mouse on a computer.
Second, in apps that have a list of items (e.g. Mail, Messages, Notes, etc.), you can now press harder on any item in the list to peek at what is in that item. This function is incredibly useful in the Mail app. I often find myself trying to find a specific message in my Inbox from a specific person. I'll see one email that could be it, tap on that message in the list, then see that particular message take up the entire screen, realize that it isn't the message I want, so I need to tap the back button at the top left of the screen, go to the next message, and repeat. I suspect that many of you have done these same steps. But with 3D Touch, I can instead just press on a message in the list and a floating window appears giving me a peek into the content of the message. Best of all, when I stop pressing down the preview goes away and I am still looking at the list of messages. I can then peek at the next one, the next one, etc. until I find the specific message that I want. When I can see in the preview that I have found the message, I just push down on the preview and the message pops to fill up the screen.
Another good use — if I receive an email and I want to see what it is about, but I'm not quite ready to act upon the email, I can just press on it in the list to peek. That shows me a preview of the message, but when I pick up my finger to make the preview disappear, the email status remains unread. Thus, I know to go back to it later and act upon it. Or alternatively, if the preview shows me all that I need to know about the email to act upon it, I can swipe up to see common options to apply to the message (Reply, Forward, Mark, Move, etc.).
It takes about 60 seconds to get used to using 3D Touch on a list of emails, and then you'll want to use the function every time. It works great.
Although the major two functions of 3D Touch are the Quick Action menu on app icons and the Peek and Pop functions with a preview, that is just the beginning. 3D Touch can also be used in many other ways. For example, if you are typing on your iPhone screen and you want to go back and change something in a prior sentence, press on the keyboard to have it change into a trackpad on which you can control the cursor and place it in an exact spot in a message. Nifty and useful.
If you press on the left edge of the screen in any app, the app switch shows up (the same thing that you would see if you double-press the Home button). If you press on the left edge of the screen and then swipe all the way to the right, you switch to the prior app. It's the iPhone's version of Control-Tab on a PC or Command-Tab on a Mac.
Moreover, app developers can use 3D Touch in all sorts of useful ways within their apps. In Apple's Notes app, for example, iOS 9 introduced the ability to write in a Notes message, useful if you want to quickly draw something with your finger. On the iPhone 6s, the app becomes pressure sensitive to your fingertip, so if you press lightly you get a smaller line and if you press harder you get a darker line.
3D Touch is brand new, so for now you can only use it in Apple's own apps. But give it a little bit of time, and I'm sure that clever app developers will find all sorts of useful ways to integrate 3D Touch into the unique functions of their apps. I suspect that six months from now, I'll be using 3D Touch in all of the main apps that I use, and as a result I will be much faster and more productive on my iPhone. (And I'm sure that game developers will have a lot of fun finding ways to take advantage of 3D Touch in games.)
3D Touch is a big deal, one of those great features, like Touch ID, that is simple to use while also providing a lot of power. And unlike Touch ID, which is just about security and verification, 3D Touch will be useful for numerous apps in countless different ways. This is the big new feature of the iPhone 6s, and like multi-touch on the original iPhone in 2007, I predict that it will become an integral part of the iPhone experience for many years to come.
Speed
3D Touch may be the biggest new feature in the iPhone 6s, but one of the most noticeable new features in the speed. The iPhone 6s uses Apple's new A9 processor, and is the first iPhone with 2 GB of RAM. (It has been 1 GB of RAM since the iPhone 5 was released in 2012.) Those two upgrades make everything on the iPhone a lot faster. Thus, it is more responsive and it is easier to get your work done without waiting for the iPhone to catch up with you. Every new iPhone is faster than the generation before it, but the jump in speed this year is especially noticeable, and really nice.
Apple also introduced the second generation of Touch ID, which means that the iPhone reads your fingerprint even faster. Touch ID wasn't slow on prior models, but now it is virtually instantaneous. For a silly game, see if you can wake up an iPhone that is asleep by pressing the home button but pull your finger off quickly before the iPhone has read your fingerprint and unlocks the screen. Can you even do it? It is possible, but you need to be really, really fast. And if you are unlocking your iPhone just to look at something on the lock screen, such as the time or date or a notification on the lock screen, you are better of pressing the sleep/wake button on the side of the iPhone where there is no risk of the iPhone recognizing your fingerprint.
Apple also improved Wi-Fi and LTE on the iPhone 6s. For example, my cable modem typically provides download speeds of around 100 Mbps to my computer, connected to my router via an Ethernet cord. If I'm in the same room as my Airport Base Station, my iPhone 6 will typically get top download speeds of around 70-75 Mbps. My iPhone 6s can get over 100 Mbps — wireless Internet that is just as fast as wired. As I walk farther away in my house the speed decreases, but it remains noticeably faster on the iPhone 6s.
Hey Siri
The iPhone previously had the ability to use the Hey Siri function when it was plugged in to power. Thus, if you were charging your iPhone, even when the screen was black because it was asleep, you could say "Hey Siri" followed by a command and the iPhone would respond. Say "Hey Siri what time is it" and the iPhone will speak the current time. With the iPhone 6s, Apple has moved the Hey Siri function onto the integrated M9 coprocessor, which means that Hey Siri can be turned on all the time — even when your iPhone is not charging — without draining the battery.
When I first heard of the improvement to Hey Siri, my thought was that it was interesting but that I would turn it off immediately. After all, I don't want my iPhone performing commands just because someone next to me says "Hey Siri." But on the iPhone 6s, the iPhone lets Siri learn your voice before Hey Siri is activated, which means the risk of someone else activating Siri is much lower.
As a test one night, I put my iPhone 6s in the middle of the table, when the screen was dark and it was asleep, and I said "Hey Siri what time is it." Siri instantly recognized my voice and told me the time. Then I asked my wife, my son, and my daughter (who were sitting around the same table) to say the same thing. Sure enough, Siri ignored them. My son and daughter then attempted to imitate my voice, again with no success. Mind you we are talking about a 7 year old girl and a 9 year old boy, so their attempts to imitate my deeper voice were fairly unconvincing, even though they did provide me and my wife with lots of comedy. Nevertheless, this initial test — unscientific as it may be — led me to decide to keep the Hey Siri function on for a while and see how it works in real life. It is pretty useful to be able to ask Siri a question without having to first hold down on the home button — especially if my hands are on my computer keyboard because I am writing a brief or typing an email.
Camera
There are four new features when it comes to taking pictures with an iPhone 6s. First, the front-facing camera is a much better 5-megapixel camera (up from 1.2-megapixel) and the screen of the iPhone can flash to simulate a flash. I don't take many selfie pictures, so this doesn't mean much to me, but I won't judge if high-quality selfie pictures are important to you.
Second, the new Live Photos feature automatically captures the 1.5 seconds of video before and after you take a picture and saves that as a movie along with the picture itself. The result is a picture that takes up twice as much space, but you have the ability to 3D Touch in a picture to see what happened just before and just after the picture. If you have kids or pets, this could be a fun feature — and the feature is especially amusing to my kids since we just finished reading all of the Harry Potter books.
Third, the back camera features a 12-megapixel camera (up from the 8-megapixel iPhone 6). This can result in slightly better pictures, although in my limited tests so far it hasn't proven to be a major improvement over the iPhone 6. Even so, it is nice for the camera to get better every year with every new iPhone.
Fourth, you can now choose to capture video in 4K. I haven't decided if I will use this feature. On the one hand, TVs are so much better today than they were 20 years ago that I'm sure they will be even better 20 years from now, so part of me wants to preserve the highest quality video of my kids so that the quality looks good even in the future when the technology is much improved. On the other hand, 4K video takes up a lot of space, although I do have the largest iPhone model (128 GB) so I suppose I have room for it.
I'm glad to have these four new features, especially since I take a lot more pictures and video with my iPhone than with my Nikon DSLR camera, which takes beautiful pictures but is big and heavy and a pain to carry around. The camera on the iPhone 6 was already pretty darn good, but it is nice to be better.
Other changes
Those are the big changes, but there are some other improvements. The iPhone body is stronger as a result is the use of a new aluminum casing. The glass on the face of the iPhone is stronger. There is a new Rose Gold color, which is like a metallic pink. (I got the Space Gray model.)
The iPhone 6s is also sightly heavier than the iPhone 6 (143 g/5.0 oz versus 129 g/4.6 oz). It's not something I notice unless I put one phone in each hand and actually try to feel the difference; in every day use the weight feels about the same. Note, however, that I have heard that the weight difference is more noticeable on the iPhone 6s Plus, which is 192 g/6.8 oz versus 172 g/6.1 oz for the iPhone 6 Plus.
The iPhone 6 was the first iPhone that I ever used every day with a case, because the curved sides made it somewhat slippery and I was afraid that I would drop it without a case. The iPhone 6s feels just as slippery to me, so I guess I'll be using that case again for another year.
Upgrade experience
This is the seventh year that I have upgraded to a new iPhone. Some upgrades have been better than others, but this upgrade did not go smoothly for me.
My typical advice for an iPhone upgrade is to connect your old iPhone to a computer running iTunes and do an encrypted backup. That way, even your passwords and settings are stored in the backup file. Then connect the new iPhone to the computer and restore from that same backup file. This system has worked very well for me in the past.
I knew that this year would be different because I use an Apple Watch, which is designed to work with only a specific iPhone. I would also have to move it to the new iPhone.
Based on what did and did not work for me, here is what I recommend that you do if you own an Apple Watch and you are upgrading:
- Launch the Apple Watch app on your old iPhone, tap the first option "Apple Watch," and select Unpair Apple Watch. That will backup the contents of your Apple Watch to your old iPhone, and then remove the connection.
- Connect the old iPhone to a computer and do an encrypted backup.
- In iTunes on that computer, click on the App section, then click the Updates tab, and click Upgrade All Apps in the bottom right corner.
- Connect the new iPhone to the computer and follow the instructions to restore from that backup that you just made.
- Launch the Apple Watch app on your new iPhone, pair it to your Apple Watch, and select to restore the Apple Watch from the backup that you made in Step #1.
Unfortunately, I didn't do Step #3, and it caused me a lot of problems because some apps were not correctly updated on my new iPhone. Instead, I saw many apps on the iPhone 6s with dark icons and the word "Waiting..." under each app, as shown here:
I never could figure out how to force those apps to finish updating. After trying lots of other steps (re-syncing to the computer, signing out of the App Store and signing back in again, tapping on the icon, screaming at the icons, etc.) I ultimately had to delete each affected app from my iPhone and download a fresh new copy from the App Store. For some apps, that was actually no big deal because the app contained no unique data for me. For other apps that had some data associated with them, I lost that data when I deleted the app and downloaded a new copy. (For example, I lost my workflows in the Workflow app and my actions in the Launch Center Pro app, and I had to recreate them. Fortunately I could consult my old iPhone 6 to to do so.)
Hopefully you won't have any of these problems when you upgrade. Perhaps my advice will help.
Conclusion
Apple is now on its ninth iPhone model, and it is still managing to come up with great new features. The iPhone 6s is a true joy to use. 3D Touch is fantastic, making it faster to get things done on an iPhone, and this feature will become even more useful when third parties embrace it. Also, the increased speed and the other new features all contribute to the overall experience. The iPhone 6s is a nice upgrade from last year's iPhone 6, but if you are using an older model of the iPhone then this will be a huge upgrade for you.
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