[Updated] iPhone 6s uses NVMe SSD, capable of up to 1800+MB/sec reads

[PlayStation 2]

I'm surprised Apple didn't advertise the fuck out of this.

[Misanthrope]

Apple actually being innovative....might it have been due to the Red Moon last night? 

[KirbyTech]

As much as I hate to say it - I could easily see phones overtaking light usage for an example school documents and stuff - if we get a proper keyboard for it. I mean, they almost have the performance now with the new Apple processor beating out certain other processors.

I already do something similar, I hook up a bluetooth keyboard and will type on it for short docs that I can do while on a drive somewhere. 

[Nup]

Why don't they tell us these things? 

 

But thats pretty damn cool. Thanks for sharing! 

[NumLock21]

APPLE DID SOMETHING INNOVATIVE WTF

All thanks to their powerful marketing. It's Apple so no matter how high they charge, people will still buy it. This is why can go ahead and have retina displays, a single usb c in their macbook,  and the reason why they can put NVMe into their iphone 6s Plus. Other phone companies try to do that and you'll have millions complaining it's too expensive.

[Mew]

That's because Apple only markets the stuff Jonh Doe might care about, for us, the fact that they are using a fully fledge SSD on a phone might be equal to a nerdgasm. To Jonh Doe this information is almost irrelevant, its the same reason apple never said anything about the RAM upgrade and only said that the A9 SoC is X amount faster that last year iPhone.

 

Apple never talks about specs, ever.

 

But during WWDC I believe, they talked about how much faster the pcie ssd in the new macbooks and macbook pros were. They also throw around terms like "64 bit" even though it also means nothing to the everyday people. However, I do like it when Anandtech is able to uncover these gems in Apple's products and to prove that Apple's phones and tablets are among the very best in the industry.

[Mercay]

What I want to know is if its only for the 6s Plus, since the regular 6s isn't  even on that chart!

[Doobeedoo]

Awesome to hear NVMe in smartphones, that's great. This reminds me, Samsung used different type of storage memory for Galaxy S6 but I don't thing it's SSD like though.

[Mew]

What worries more is how dismal the Nexus 6 did. 30MB/s?? That's worse than my hard drive, for sure.

 

This might be the reason i stop hating on iPhones and i'm actually kinda considering getting the 6S, because to me, i can never daily an Android, though i think they're superior.

 

Yea, the OS is really down to preference, but it's hard to beat the hardware of an iPhone as a whole.

 

but Apple didn't invent NVMe. They're just copying. /s

 

 

 

I actually agree with this. It's really just a natural progression in storage technology; instead of gradually making their way to fast ssds, they decided to jump there. Sure there may be problems with it that might show up in a couple months, but it's cool to be on the bleeding edge nonetheless. It'll also be pretty amazing to see that the number of NVMe users on mobile surpass that of the desktop and laptop that quickly. 

[captain cactus]

Well, they did state that the A9X had a "desktop-class" memory controller, but that's the A9X and iPad Pro's, not the A9 and iPhones. Good to see it in the iPhones as well.

[Clyne]

APPLE DID SOMETHING INNOVATIVE WTF

I though nothing was innovated after jobs died.

[jecho]

I just got the 6s and I can absolutely guarantee it is the fastest phone I have ever used. All the games I have load way faster than I could expect. It really is a great phone despite all the apple hate out there.

[LAwLz]

Very impressive results. Not even the S6 gets even close. Storage performance has been a big weakness of mobile devices for a very long time and it's good to see that Apple takes it very seriously.

I think quite a few people misunderstand this though. They are not putting like a laptop or desktop SSD inside the phone. The controller itself for those drives are as big as the entire package for phones. You won't get anywhere near the same performance from this as from a proper NVMe drive, but it's much faster than eMMC and UFS.

 

 

Apple never talks about specs, ever.

They talk about specs all the time. Did you not see how much time they dedicated to talking about how they made the first 64bit CPU in a phone? How they broke 1 billion transistors. How they always have a ton of slides showing how much faster their products are compared to their older products.

They talk about specs just as much as for example Samsung does, but for some reason people seem to forget that they do.

 

 

What worries more is how dismal the Nexus 6 did. 30MB/s?? That's worse than my hard drive, for sure.

Full disk encryption without hardware acceleration. One of the many reasons why I disliked the Nexus 6.

Such a stupid idea.

[peanutsrevenge]

What a shame they still love to rip their loyal customers off when it comes to capacity.
Poor fanatics, their only crime is gullibility, quite the financial price they pay for it though.

[captain cactus]

They talk about specs all the time. Did you not see how much time they dedicated to talking about how they made the first 64bit CPU in a phone? How they broke 1 billion transistors. How they always have a ton of slides showing how much faster their products are compared to their older products.

They talk about specs just as much as for example Samsung does, but for some reason people seem to forget that they do.

I think he means like the exact technical specs. Apple never mentioned core count (only with the A5 since it was an actual feature and core doubling over the A4), they never mention RAM, they never mention clock speeds, etc. They talk about how "it's 70% faster on CPU and 90% faster on GPU" since to the average Joe, that makes sense. Us techheads understand more than that and it's up to benchmarks and reviews (and teardowns to an extend) to see what's really going on under the hood.

[LAwLz]

I think he means like the exact technical specs. Apple never mentioned core count (only with the A5 since it was an actual feature and core doubling over the A4), they never mention RAM, they never mention clock speeds, etc. They talk about how "it's 70% faster on CPU and 90% faster on GPU" since to the average Joe, that makes sense. Us techheads understand more than that and it's up to benchmarks and reviews (and teardowns to an extend) to see what's really going on under the hood.

I'm not so sure I even agree with that. It's true that they don't talk about things like core count, RAM capacity or such, but they do give us information that the average Joe don't understand.

This was one of the slides from the iPhone 5S event. Ever heard any other phone company talk about how many transistors their SoC got, or how many more registers it got compared to the older generation?

[Mew]

Very impressive results. Not even the S6 gets even close. Storage performance has been a big weakness of mobile devices for a very long time and it's good to see that Apple takes it very seriously.

 

 

 

What a shame they still love to rip their loyal customers off when it comes to capacity.

Poor fanatics, their only crime is gullibility, quite the financial price they pay for it though.

 

I guess a good question to ask is what would you prefer- fast storage or more, albeit slower storage that might not even be capable of the write speeds required for high bitrate 4k recording? In fact, I'm going to add that as a poll question. 

[LAwLz]

I guess a good question to ask is what would you prefer- fast storage or more, albeit slower storage that might not even be capable of the write speeds required for high bitrate 4k recording? In fact, I'm going to add that as a poll question. 

I think that depends on how fast and little or how slow and much storage we are talking about.

In my "dream phone" (using current gen technology) I would like 32GB of storage as the minimum option, and I would want that storage to be fast. It doesn't have to be iPhone 6S tier fast, but Galaxy S6 tier fast would be great.

But what I really want is microSD so that I can have fast storage for apps and such, and slow but big storage for things like movies, music and pictures.

 

We have the technology to not have to choose between fast and small, or slow and big. It's a shame we are moving away from that.

[pit5000]

when apple talks specs, they prefer doing so in relative terms (compared to last gen stuff), not absolute numbers (amount of RAM, geekbench scores, etc...)

 

70% faster... blah blah, 100% faster..., so one

 

The average joe doesn't care about 6000 multicore benchmark points or 4GB DDR4 RAM

[Arty]

And they don't say a single thing about it at the announcement LOL. It's as if it's not even something to be proud about. 

Sane with the phone being pretty much water proof

didn't mention it at all.

[79wjd]

when apple talks specs, they prefer doing so in relative terms (compared to last gen stuff), not absolute numbers (amount of RAM, geekbench scores, etc...)

 

70% faster... blah blah, 100% faster..., so one

 

The average joe doesn't care about 6000 multicore benchmark points or 4GB DDR4 RAM

Nor should they. 

 

Don't get me wrong, specs are important, but they're also meaningless if you don't understand the meaning of those specs. 

 

Sane with the phone being pretty much water proof

didn't mention it at all.

Honestly, that's just a stupid selling point (for the manufacturer/distributor to make) because it will just encourage people to be 'dumbasses' and break the phones causing them to get upset with Apple support when they won't replace it due to water damage. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

@OP you do know that writing 4k (in non-raw) doesn't require anywhere near 200 MBps...

 

Hell standard "high speed" SD cards with max write speeds of 40-80 MB/s are still in with some 4k video formats.

 

On a side note, this would be cool if it was a respectable amount of storage at a reasonable price. Too bad...

[Ex14]

All thanks to their powerful marketing. It's Apple so no matter how high they charge, people will still buy it. This is why can go ahead and have retina displays, a single usb c in their macbook,  and the reason why they can put NVMe into their iphone 6s Plus. Other phone companies try to do that and you'll have millions complaining it's too expensive.

This ^ 

for the profit margins apple is earning it should not be surprising they can afford to do this at all. Well also them having control over their supply chain and proper control on their product line too. Have you guys seen other manufacturers? They're all (mostly) struggling to stay afloat as is. 

[LukeHebb]

This ^ 

for the profit margins apple is earning it should not be surprising they can afford to do this at all. Well also them having control over their supply chain and proper control on their product line too. Have you guys seen other manufacturers? They're all (mostly) struggling to stay afloat as is. 

 

But isn't that realistically because the Android manufacturers seem to be focussed on throwing more cores, more RAM, more... whatever crap at the phone instead of making a nice, reliable piece of hardware?

 

Full disclosure: I'm an Android converted to iOS guy. Went from LG to Nexus to iPhone and haven't looked back since the switch. The OS and the hardware just seem more... polished. More like a product the manufacturer is proud of. Maybe that's why in iOS marketing they show what the product does, I mean, we all remember this from Motorola, right?

 

 

[Firet2000]

APPLE DID SOMETHING INNOVATIVE WTF

NOOO!!!!! DON'T YOU REALIZE IT'S A PLAN FROM THE ILLUMINATY!!!!!!!?????!?