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Did we iPhone 6 owners get hosed on the A8 chip?

K

Kendo

macrumors 68020
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Apr 4, 2011
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A 25% increase in CPU and 50% increase in GPU seems like a barely significant increase. The A4 to A5 gave twice the CPU and 9X the GPU. Ever since then, chip performance has been doubled with each new chip except the A8.

Is the iPhone 6 (and to a greater extent the iPhone 6 Plus) the "iPad 3" of our generation? A CPU/GPU with 1GB RAM that is barely powerful enough to run the 6 Plus 1080p screen? Because it is underpowered to begin with, I don't think the 6 and 6 Plus will run iOS 10 smoothly when normally iPhones can run the next two iOS updates without a huge degradation in performance.
 
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I've said it and I'll say it again. The A8 chip is a dog. The iPhone 6 Plus always felt slow. The lack of proper RAM didn't help matters. It's going down as the worst iPhone I've ever used. The fact that in last years keynote, when talking about the A8 performance, they had to go all the way back to the original iPhone as said it's 80x faster than the 3G or something silly like that - showing off some upward sloping graph. They didn't even directly compare it to the 5S! This year, they made a note to compare the 6S to the 6 directly. And I was watching for it.
 
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Yeah, the 6 kinda is the iPad 3 of iPhones.
Apple gave us what we wanted for years (bigger screen/resolution on the iPhone, retina screen on the iPad), but with specs similar to last gen.
CPU wise, the 6+ is barely faster than the 5s, has the same amount of ram, but has bigger resolution and runs iOS8 which is pretty laggy/glitchy compared to 7.1.2.

iPad4/6s are fine.
 
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Benched08 said:
Are we using the same phones? I tried a Galaxy S6 Edge+, a phone with supposedly the fastest SoC around and it wasn't half as responsive or swift as my 6+.
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I find this hard to believe. My Galaxy S6 still blows my iPhone 6 away in terms or speed and performance.
 
maflynn said:
Did we get hosed, no of course not. We bought a brand new phone in 2014 that looked and operated great. Now that apple updated their new phone with a new cpu, people are now complaining about how poorly the older chip is?
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People are complaining now??? People have been complaining about the less than iphone-like performance almost as long as it has been released. Clearly Apple rested on its laurels a bit last year since it gave everyone what they wanted, bigger screens.
 
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maflynn said:
Did we get hosed, no of course not. We bought a brand new phone in 2014 that looked and operated great. Now that apple updated their new phone with a new cpu, people are now complaining about how poorly the older chip is?
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I've been complaining since day one. Not just because the 6S+ is out. Go back and watch 2014's keynote. Apple glossed over the A8 chip performance. Apple knew all they had to do was given bigger screens and thus realize bigger profit margins.
 
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A8 has the shallowest gradient in recent times in terms of Geekbench scores.

untitled-png.583963
 
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Kendo said:
A 25% increase in CPU and 50% increase in GPU seems like a barely significant increase. The A4 to A5 gave twice the CPU and 9X the GPU. Ever since then, chip performance has been doubled with each new chip except the A8.

Is the iPhone 6 (and to a greater extent the iPhone 6 Plus) the "iPad 3" of our generation? A CPU/GPU with 1GB RAM that is barely powerful enough to run the 6 Plus 1080p screen? Because it is underpowered to begin with, I don't think the 6 and 6 Plus will run iOS 10 smoothly when normally iPhones can run the next two iOS updates without a huge degradation in performance.
Click to expand...
Keep it on 8.4.1 My regular 6 is still lightning fast (on 8.4.1 not ios9) and runs games perfectly smooth. The safari reloads and app reloads are a bit annoying but it's still a powerful phone. If only I didn't have screen uniformity problems I'd be completely satisfied. Been through 7 iPhone 6's in one year and still can't get an acceptable uniform screen.
 
sunking101 said:
The iPhone 6 and especially the 6+ will have the shortest enjoyable lifespan of any iPhone in recent memory. A bad release and for those of us who got them, a very bad buy.
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Sorry but only a "few" are thinking like you as the 6 and 6+ were Apple best selling phones to date. Many will use and enjoy these phones for many years to come. You lack of enjoyment is not an indication of if it was a good buy. They will still sell millions more of these "bad buys" in the next year.
 
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Newtons Apple said:
Sorry but only a "few" are thinking like you as the 6 and 6+ were Apple best selling phones to date. Many will use and enjoy these phones for many years to come. You lack of enjoyment is not an indication of if it was a good buy. They will still sell millions more of these "bad buys" in the next year.
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Yes they will still sell many more, to unsuspecting punters and people who don't use their phones for much more than social media, games & phonecalls. High sales do not necessarily equate to a brilliant product, or an industry-leading product.
 
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This is what I'm talking about between the 5S and the 6, which is why Apple didn't directly compare in last year's Keynote:

Geekbench-3.jpg


What's that a 15% bump in performance? Yes, they were faster, but nothing what we are seeing between the 6 and 6S. The iPhone 6/6 Plus was UNDER POWERED. Period.
 
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Not sure if it's my phone or what, I've had difficulties with constant crashing/rebooting (even when I am just trying to update via App Store) for the past 5 months. I really hope iPhone 6s Plus will solve these issues.
 
Winryito said:
Not sure if it's my phone or what, I've had difficulties with constant crashing/rebooting (even when I am just trying to update via App Store) for the past 5 months. I really hope iPhone 6s Plus will solve these issues.
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Just do a fresh restore and that should fix all your problems.
 
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