The iPhone 5s Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 17, 2013 9:01 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- iPhone
- iPhone 5S
Final Words
The iPhone 5s is quite possibly the biggest S-update we've ever seen from Apple. I remember walking out of the venue during Apple's iPhone 5 launch and being blown away by the level of innovation, at the platform/silicon level, that Apple crammed into the iPhone 5. What got me last time was that Apple built their own ARM based CPU architecture from the ground up, while I understand that doesn't matter for the majority of consumers - it's no less of an achievement in my eyes. At the same time I remember reading through a sea of disappointment on Twitter - users hoping for more from Apple with the iPhone 5. If you fell into that group last time, there's no way you're going to be impressed by the iPhone 5s. For me however, there's quite a bit to be excited about.
The A7 SoC is seriously impressive. Apple calls it a desktop-class SoC, but I'd rather refer to it as something capable of competing with the best Intel has to offer in this market. In many cases the A7's dual cores were competitive with Intel's recently announced Bay Trail SoC. Web browsing is ultimately where I noticed the A7's performance the most. As long as I was on a good internet connection, web pages just appeared after resolving DNS. The A7's GPU performance is also insanely good - more than enough for anything you could possibly throw at the iPhone 5s today, and fast enough to help keep this device feeling quick for a while.
Apple's move to 64-bit proves it is not only committed to supporting its own microarchitectures in the mobile space, but also that it is being a good steward of the platform. Just like AMD had to do in the mid-2000s, Apple must plan ahead for the future of iOS and that's exactly what it has done. The immediate upsides to moving to 64-bit today are increased performance across the board as well as some huge potential performance gains in certain FP and cryptographic workloads.
The new camera is an evolutionary but much appreciated step forward compared to the iPhone 5. Low light performance is undoubtedly better, and Apple presents its users with an interesting balance of spatial resolution and low light sensitivity. The HTC One seemed to be a very polarizing device for those users who wanted more resolution and not just great low light performance - with the 5s Apple attempts to strike a more conservative balance. The 5s also benefits from the iOS's excellent auto mode, which seems to do quite well for novice photographers. I would love to see full manual control exposed in the camera UI, but Apple's auto mode seems to be quite good for those who don't want to mess with settings. The A7's improved ISP means things like HDR captures are significantly quicker than they were on even the iPhone 5. Shot to shot latency is also incredibly low.
Apple's Touch ID was the biggest surprise for me. I found it very well executed and a nice part of the overall experience. When between the 5s and the 5/5c, I immediately miss Touch ID. Apple is still a bit too conservative with where it allows Touch ID instead of a passcode, but even just as a way to unlock the device and avoid typing in my iCloud password when downloading apps it's a real improvement. I originally expected Touch ID to be very gimmicky, but now I'm thinking this actually may be a feature we see used far more frequently on other platforms as well.
The 5s builds upon the same chassis as the iPhone 5 and with that comes a number of tradeoffs. I still love the chassis, design and build quality - I just wish it had a larger display. While I don't believe the world needs to embrace 6-inch displays, I do feel there is room for another sweet spot above 4-inches. For me personally, Motorola has come the closest with the Moto X and I would love to see what Apple does with a larger chassis. The iPhone has always been a remarkably power efficient platform, a larger chassis wouldn't only give it a bigger, more usable screen but also a much larger battery to boot. I'm not saying that replacing the 4-inch 5s chassis is the only option, I'd be fine with a third model sitting above it in screen size/battery capacity similar to how there are both 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pros.
The lack of 802.11ac and LTE-A support also bother me as the 5s is so ahead of the curve elsewhere in silicon. There's not much I can see to either point other than it's obvious that both will be present in next year's model, and for some they may be features worth waiting for.
At the end of the day, if you prefer iOS for your smartphone - the iPhone 5s won't disappoint. In many ways it's an evolutionary improvement over the iPhone 5, but in others it is a significant step forward. What Apple's silicon teams have been doing for these past couple of years has really started to pay off. From a CPU and GPU standpoint, the 5s is probably the most futureproof of any iPhone ever launched. As much as it pains me to use the word futureproof, if you are one of those people who likes to hold onto their device for a while - the 5s is as good a starting point as any.
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akdj - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
I completely agree---that said, we're really only 5 years 'in'. The original iPhone in '07, a true Android follow up in late '07/early '08---those were crap. Not really necessary to 'bench' them. We all kinda knew the performance we could expect, same for the next generation or two. In the past three years---Moore's law has swung in to high gear, these are now---literally---replacement computers (along with tablets) for the majority of the population. They're not using their home desktop anymore for email, Facebook, surfing and recipes. Even gaming---unless their @ 'work' and in front of their 'work Dell' from 2006, they're on their smartphones...for literally everything! In these past three years---and it seems Anand, Brian and crew are quite 'up front' about the lack of mobile testing applications and software----we're in it's infancy. 36 real months in with software, hardware and OS'es worth 'testing, benchmarking, and measuring' their performance. Just my opinion....and I suppose we're saying the same thing.That said---even Google's new Octane test was and is being used lately---GeekBench has revised their software, it's coming is my point. But just looking at those differences in the generations of iPhones makes it blatantly obvious how far we've come in 4/5 short years. In 2008 and 9---these were still phones with easier ways to text and access the internet, some cool apps and ways to take, manipulate and share pics and videos. Today----they do literally everything an actual computer does and I'd bet---in a lot of cases, these phones are as or more powerful, faster and more acessible than those ancient beige boxes from the mid 2000s a lot of folks have in their home office;)
Duck <(' ) - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
they are posting false benchmark scores. Same phones score different in youtube vids.iPhone 5 browsermark 2 score is around 2300
check here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iATFnXociC4
sgs4 scores 2745 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdNE4NoFq8U
ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Actually, there are quite a lot of discrepancies in this review.For starters, the "CPU performance" page only contains JS benchmarks and not a single native application. And iOS and Android use entirely different JS engines, so this is literally a case of comparing apples to oranges.
Native benchmarks don't compare the new apple chip to "old 32 bit v7 chips" - it only compares the new apple chip to the old ones, and also compares the new chip in 32bit and 64 bit mode. Oddly enough, the geekbench at engadget shows tegra 4 actually being faster.
Then, there is the inclusion of hardware implementation in charts that are supposed to show the benefits of 64bit execution mode, but in reality the encryption workloads are handled in a fundamentally different way in the two modes, in software in 32bit mode and implemented in hardware in 64bit mode. This turns the integer performance chart from a mixed bad into one falsely advertising performance gains attributed to 64bit execution and not to the hardware implementations as it should. The FP chart also shows no miracles, wider SIMD units result in almost 2x the score in few tests, nothing much in the rest.
All in all, I'd say this is a very cleverly compiled review, cunningly deceitful to show the new apple chip in a much better light than it is in reality. No surprises, considering this is AT, it would be more unexpected to see an unbiased review.
I guess we will have to wait a bit more until mass availability for unbiased reviews, considering all those "featured" reviews usually come with careful guidelines by the manufacturer that need to be followed to create an unrealistically good presentation of the product. That is the price you have to pay to get the new goodies first - play by the rules of a greedy and exploitative industry. Corporate "honesty" :)
I don't say the new chip is bad, I just say it is deliberately presented unrealistically good. Krait has expanded the SIMD units to 128 bit as well, so we should see similar performance even without the move to a 64bit ecosystem. Last but not least, 64bit code bloats the memory footprint of applications because of pointers being twice as big, and while those limited memory footprint synthetic benches play well with the single gigabyte of ram on this device, I expect an actual performance demanding real world application will be bottlenecked by the ram capacity. All in all, the decision to go for 64 bit architecture is mostly a PR stunt, surely, 64bit is the future, but in the case of this product, and considering its limited ram capacity, it doesn't really make all that sense, but is something that will no doubt keep up the spirit of apple fanboys, and make up for their declining sales while they bring out the iphone 6, which will close all those deliberately left gaping holes in the 5s.
Slaanesh - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Interesting comment. I'd like to know what Anand has to say about this.ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
I am betting my comment will most likely vanish mysteriously. I'd be happy to see my concerns addressed though, but I admit I am putting Anand in a very inconvenient position.Mondozai - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
It's all a conspiracy. In fact your comment has already disappeared, but in its place is now a hologram effect that makes it impossible to tell it from the blank space. So why put in the hologram and not just delete it? Because Anand is playing mind games with us.And who said I typed this comment? It could have been someone else, someone doing Anand's bidding.
I admit I am putting his scheme of deception in a very difficult position right now.
/s
ddriver - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Few days ago I posted a comment criticizing AT moderators being idle and tolerant of the "I make $$$ sitting in front of my mac" spam, few minutes later my comment was removed while the spam remained, which led me to expect similar fate for this comment. Good thing I was wrong ;)WardenOfBats - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
I'd honestly like to see your misleading comment removed as well. You seem to think that anyone cares what the 32bit performance is of the 5S when everyone knows damn well that app developers are going to be clamouring to switch to the 64bit tech (that Android doesn't even have or support) to get these power increases. Other than that, the rest of your comment is just nonsense. The whole point is that the iPhone 5S is faster and the fact that they use different JS engines is a part of that. Apple just knows how to make software optimizations and hardware that runs them faster and you can see how they just blow the competition away.CyberAngel - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
Misleading? Yes! In favor of Apple!You need to double the memory lines, too and caches and...oh boy!
The next Apple CPU will be "corrected" and THEN we'll see...hopefully RAM is 8GB...
Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 19, 2013 - link
As we often have to remind people, we don't delete comments unless they're spam. However when we do so, any child comments become orphaned and lose their place in the hierarchy, becoming posts at the end of the thread. Your comment isn't going anywhere, nor have any of your previous comments.