Apple Announces iPhone 6s & 6s Plus: Introducing 3D Touch & Apple’s A9 SoC

Following months of ever-increasing anticipation, Apple has today revealed its next iPhones: 6s and 6s Plus. As it happens, most of the rumors we’ve been hearing about for a while have proven to be true, so admittedly, if you’ve been keeping on top of those, there’s not much to be surprised by here. That doesn’t mean that the new models are not a worthy successor, though, because they definitely are.

One of the biggest features of the new iPhones is “next-gen” multi-touch, called 3D Touch. With it, users can press on the iPhone’s display with a varying level of pressure in order to get an app to behave in a certain way. With Facebook, for example, pressing a certain way on the home screen icon will spawn a menu to allow you to post a status update or do something else. With other apps, a press could lead you to a specific location of the app directly, in effect saving time. And, it could even be taken advantage of for games.

It sounds like a simple feature, but it’s one that I think will be important, and one that you wouldn’t want to do without after becoming familiar with it. That being the case, I can’t imagine it’ll take long to see a similar feature on other mobile platforms – and perhaps even bigger notebook / desktop platforms in the future.

Other perks of the new iPhones include an improved aluminum chassis and glass front, “Live Photos” which allows you to view an image with motion (they’re in effect mini videos), some significant camera improvements, as well as Apple’s latest phone processor, A9, which includes the M9 motion co-processor.

Let’s see how these new phones compare to the old, shall we?

The latest iPhones share almost identical dimensions with the regular 6 and 6 Plus, although some sides gained a mere 0.01-inch. What’s actually notable is that their weight has increased – the 6s gains 14 grams while the 6s Plus gains 20. Screen resolutions remain the same, and naturally, so does the PPI. Also remaining the same is the battery, storage options, and pricing.

iPhone cameras have long been considered to be some of the best in the smartphone world, so it’s intriguing to see Apple promising a much-improved camera on these new iPhones. Apple stressed that while the megapixel count has been boosted 50%, it didn’t happen at the expense of noisier or less color-accurate images. In effect, 12MP images out of the new iPhone should look as good as those 8MP ones that came out of the last models.

Even the front FaceTime camera sees a boost of resolution, going from 1.2 to 5 megapixel. As has become a theme with high-end phones, Apple’s also begun supporting 4K video recording, and if the examples shown at its event in San Francisco are accurate, both the video and still imagery captured with the iSight camera is going to look amazing coming from a phone.

While not all of the specs have been revealed by Apple, it won’t take long for some blanks to be filled in. It appears that the regular 6s will retain 1GB of RAM, while the 6s Plus will boost that to 2GB. We’re also not sure of the exact resolution for still images out of the FaceTime camera.

Both of the new iPhones will become available for preorder this Saturday.