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Apple downplays iPhone 6s A9 chip power draw concerns

Yesterday news spread that one version of the iPhone 6s seemingly greatly outperforms the other. The A9 chip inside of the new iPhone could be manufactured by either TSMC or Samsung, with the former's version expanding battery life by as much as 20 per cent. This news has since reached Apple, who has responded by downplaying concerns and claiming that users will notice “minimal differences” between the two versions of the A9 chip.

In a statement sent to TechCrunch, an Apple spokesperson said: “With the Apple-designed A9 chip in your iPhone 6S or iPhone 6S Plus, you are getting the most advanced smartphone chip in the world. Every chip we ship meets Apple's highest standards for providing incredible performance and delivering great battery life, regardless of iPhone 6S capacity, colour or model.”

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“Certain manufactured lab tests which run the processors with a continuous heavy workload until the battery depletes are not representative of real-world use, since they spend an unrealistic amount of time at the highest CPU performance state. It's a misleading way to measure real-world battery life. Our testing and customer data show that the actual battery life of the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, even taking into account variable component differences, varies within just two to three percent of each other.”

What Apple is saying isn't wrong, benchmark tests do stress the phone more than a typical usage scenario, so users may not notice big differences. In-fact, several videos have shown that under normal conditions, the Samsung A9 and the TSMC A9 perform similarly, with the Samsung variant falling behind just a bit.

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KitGuru Says: Apple responded to this very quickly. In an ideal world, the company would be able to rely on just one manufacturer to satisfy demand and issues like this wouldn't crop up but unfortunately things didn't work out that way. If you were shopping for an iPhone 6s, would it bother you that one version may perform slightly better than the other? 

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3 comments

  1. If one ran hotter and/or had a battery life close to even an hour I would PO and return/sell the phone

  2. We see battery benchmarks but what about a proper benchmark to test processing speeds?

  3. No it wouldn’t bother me because I shall never throw money at such a device, but surly they made the same chip??
    How can one preform different then the other unless they build two different versions?
    They just using the components each company have that’s closest to the specs?