The iPhone is one of Apple’s mainstay products: They’ve built an empire on the back of that little slab of glass and circuits. But lately Apple’s been content mostly to fiddle with numbers and not add any new technology beyond gimmicky fingerprint readers to its flagship. That’s changing.
Most interesting is Apple’s incorporation of “Taptic,” as they call it. Very familiar to all five of your Apple Watch users, Taptic is where you apply a small amount of force to the screen to trigger an action. Apple’s demonstration had users, for example, lightly tapping and holding to reveal a preview, and letting go to go back to the inbox. If you need to look up, say, a train arrival time, a light tap and hold over the train number in an email and that data will pop up.
Yes, it’s subtle, but it’s a pretty strong change to the user interface that makes it more fluid. Google is likely scrambling to come up with a similar solution for Android as we speak. There are some other clever touches beyond that: Your iPhone screen is now a flash for your selfies, and now you can send a sort of selfie-GIF with sound to people called Vin-er, heh, Live Photos. It also supports LTE Advanced, if you can even get it.
Beyond that, it’s really more of the same old same old: The CPU has been upgraded and is now 70% faster, the GPU is 90 percent faster, the camera has more megapixels, you can now shoot 4K video with the iPhone (which, ironically, you cannot watch on the iPhone)
in fact, the only notable difference is now not only can you get the iPhone in tacky-ass gold, tacky-ass pink is also an option. Oh, and since these run iOS9, and we all know that each iteration of iOS is so advanced your current year-old junker just can’t handle it, be ready to upgrade. The 6S will run you $199 with a contract, and the 6S Plus will cost $299.
Of interest, you can also pay Apple $32 a month and get your iPhone upgraded every year! Yes, Apple wants $400 a year for a new iPhone. Pre-orders open September 12th; Apple’s releasing iOS 9 September 16th.