iPhone 5s: Faster Than You Think

September 24, 2013

6 AM Friday morning I headed to my local Apple Store and joined the line to get a new iPhone 5s. Even before getting a reservation ticket, it was clear that the gold iPhone 5s was in high demand, having limited supply online and in stores across the world. Fortunately, I had my eye on “Space Gray”  since it is the only 5s with a black bezel.

Before getting my hands on the 5s, I saw reactions on Twitter about how the phone didn’t seem twice as fast. This spiked my curiosity since Apple emphasized the speed of the new A7 chip. After getting the phone, I initially shared similar disappointment, but as I’ve been using the phone more, I’ve come to a different conclusion.

iPhone 5s
The iPhone 5s is fast

Unlike other iPhone upgrades, transitioning from the 5 to the 5s didn’t feel like a major performance upgrade because the the iPhone 5 was already incredibly fast. In fact, app launch is so fast on the 5 and 5s, that almost all the time it takes to launch an app is purely animation, so there wasn’t much room for speed improvement. The system apps are either fairly lightweight or as optimized as possible, so they are no longer good benchmarks for testing performance. Testing graphics performance is another matter, and for now, the main candidate is Infinity Blade III.

Because the previous model was fast, there’s much less of a wow factor when using the system apps like there was with previous upgrades. Also, there doesn’t seem to be a significant decrease in startup time as compared to the 5. Someone else may have more ideas about why this is, but honestly does startup time really matter on a phone you almost always leave on?

Where I really did start to see the A7 shine was with the OKDOTHIS app I’ve been developing. That’s not to say the app is slow or not optimized, but it does perform some complex computations. On the 5s, as soon as network requests succeed, parsing and drawing occurs lightning fast. TableViews and CollectionViews reload instantly. Seeing this performance gain makes me a little disappointed that there wasn’t a network upgrade like in previous models. The 5 felt much faster because of LTE’s blazing fast network speeds. Faster network I/O would have really complemented the faster processor. This could have been accomplished with the 802.11ac chips seen in the MacBook Air refresh this year, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the iPhone 6 to see those.

The iPhone 5s was designed with iOS 7 in mind. In previous iPhones, the gyroscope must continually be on whenever iOS 7’s parallax effects are present. The use of parallax on the home screen and lock screen are the biggest battery drains since a user interacts with these screens the most. On the 5s, the M7 coprocessor delivers energy-efficient motion data alleviating this problem. While the iPhone 5 runs iOS 7 smoothly, the A7 chip’s powerful graphics processing capabilities provide live blurring in a more efficient way, as well. With all this in mind, it seems like battery life on the 5s has been better than the 5 on iOS 7.

On the software side, I almost forgot that the iWork suite was free with the new hardware because there was no prompt or reminder. After downloading iWork apps on the 5s, they were then freely available on all my other devices.

I haven’t spent much time using the improved camera yet. I compared the camera side-by-side with the iPhone 5, and the 5s’ camera looks brighter and more vivid. Slow motion film looks great, and I’m looking forward to using the improved flash and burst mode.

The Space Gray finish looks particularly nice and the new shiny band pops against the black bezel. Besides the color differences, the phone feels the same as the 5. When displaying the 5s box next to my old 5 box, I noticed that even the box’s graphic was “flat.” It’s a front-on, gloss-free image of the device.

TouchID works great despite a few software glitches which have mostly been remedied with the 7.0.1 update. I personally will only passcode protect the phone if I am traveling so TouchID will remain off for now (probably shouldn’t have told you that). However, I can’t figure out how to enable TouchID for purchases without leaving the phone passcode to unlock on. Hopefully this is an oversight or bug and not a permanent requirement.

All in all, I’m pleased with the upgrade even though there isn’t as significant a wow-factor as with other upgrades. As time goes on, improvements with the iPhone line will become more and more iterative and they might not always amaze with your first impression. Daily use will show the value of these iterative improvements.