iPhone 6s review: 3D Touch is fun and useful, terrific camera and great performance, but battery life could be better
iPhone 6S review — Big screens won. — For the past three years, the most meaningful change to the iPhone has been the size of its screen.
Context & Ripple Effects
When The Verge reviewed the iPhone 6s, the headline judgment was that for three straight years the most meaningful iPhone change had been screen size — and that with big screens settled, Apple was pivoting to interaction depth instead. 3D Touch was the bet: a pressure-sensitive layer meant to add a new dimension to the flat touchscreen, judged fun and useful rather than essential.
AnandTech's later deep dive on the 6s and 6s Plus reinforced the hardware story, calling the A9 the best SoC in any phone at the time and the camera best-in-class for video. But the battery-life caveat in this review proved to be the durable thread: it recurs across every subsequent flagship review in this corpus, from the iPhone 7 through the XS Max and the 12 Pro Max.
First-order effects
- Buyers choosing between the 6s and 6s Plus got a clear trade-off: top-tier performance and camera against battery life The Verge explicitly flagged as needing improvement.
- 3D Touch gave developers a new input surface to design for, but its 'fun and useful' framing signaled it was an enhancement layer, not a must-have feature driving upgrades on its own.
Second-order effects
- Apple's own review cycle shows the fix pattern: the iPhone 7 review credits significant steps up in battery life and display alongside the 6s-era strengths, suggesting the battery complaint fed directly into the next generation's priorities.
- By the time reviewers assessed the XS and XS Max, long battery life had moved from weakness to headline strength — competitors' large-screen Android flagships were meanwhile competing on exactly the endurance axis Apple had conceded.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, annual flagship reviews become a ledger of which compromise Apple trades away next: the 12 Pro Max review still praises battery and camera but dings a lagging 60Hz display, showing that even at the top of the lineup one spec remains the annual sacrifice.
- Structurally, the 6s marks the point where iPhone differentiation shifted from visible form factors (the size race) to invisible ones — silicon, haptics, camera processing — making yearly reviews progressively harder to summarize in a single spec.
The trend: Flagship iPhones entered an iteration regime around the 6s where each generation's weakest attribute — first battery, later display refresh rate — becomes the explicit fix target of the next, while headline strengths like camera and performance stay constant.