iPhone 6s and 6s Plus Review: A9 SoC is the best SoC in any phone today, 3D Touch is a user experience breakthrough, best phones on the market for video capture
The Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Review — To be perfectly honest, this past year has been remarkably boring in the mobile segment.
Context & Ripple Effects
The SoC crown has changed hands inside a year: AnandTech declared Samsung's Exynos the SoC to beat in the Android space back in April, and this review hands that title to Apple's A9. The Verge's launch-week take on the same phone had flagged battery life as the weak spot; AnandTech instead frames the phone around three strengths — silicon, 3D Touch, and video capture.
That split matters because it sets up the next two years of coverage in this corpus: the iPhone 7 review later credits a significant step up in battery life and performance, and by the XS generation Apple's chips are being measured against desktop CPUs — an arc that starts with the A9 claim made here.
First-order effects
- Samsung and Android vendors lose the silicon benchmark they held since spring: with the A9 rated best-in-class, their response window runs until Apple's next chip cycle.
- Apple gains a defensible hardware differentiator in video capture over the Galaxy S6, whose camera reviewers had called merely comparable to the iPhone.
Second-order effects
- 3D Touch only pays off if developers adopt its pressure interactions at the app layer, making third-party app support the bottleneck for Apple's headline feature.
- Samsung's next flagship is pressured to reclaim the Exynos-versus-A-series lead while matching the 6s Plus on video, where it now trails outright.
Third-order effects
- If the A12-era pattern holds — mobile SoCs closing to within margins of desktop CPUs — phone silicon becomes the engine of Apple's platform advantage rather than a component spec.
- Interaction-layer breakthroughs like 3D Touch shift competition from spec sheets to input models that require whole-ecosystem buy-in, raising the bar for what counts as a meaningful phone upgrade.
The trend: Flagship smartphone competition is consolidating around custom silicon leadership and proprietary input innovations, with the A-series versus Exynos race setting the cadence.