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

[jaggysnake57]

nice to see people still cant tell the difference between innovate and invent.

 

 

apple pushing things forward again

[werto165]

Faster storage for sure, it's a pain waiting around for file transfers, however having said that I rarely actually do many file transfers, a few music transfers once in while perhaps at most. So I would probably chose just having more of it and it being a little slow. 

[Ex14]

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?

 I would boil that down to the OS actually and/or the chipmaker for not optimising for the os/viceversa (not too sure). In any case its clear that with android something ISNT optimised, either that or just how the OS runs is not as efficient as iOS or Windows Phone. Also, tbh the rest of the manufacturers do NOTHING like what apple does (i.e. design their own chips). 

Point in cas eis if You tried runningcurrent android on any of your yester years phone (custom root etcetc) I can assure you they do not and will not run as smooth even bloat free and freshly flashed.

Meanwhile, my Lumia 920 can run Windows 10 mobile (albiet buggy) not as bad as a andriod S4 phone running Lolipop (if theres such a thing)

[oreozzy]

APPLE DID SOMETHING INNOVATIVE WTF

AND THEY DIDN'T BOAST ABOUT DOING IT EITHER WHAAAAAAAAATTTTT

 

(afaik)

[LukeHebb]

 I would boil that down to the OS actually and/or the chipmaker for not optimising for the os/viceversa (not too sure). In any case its clear that with android something ISNT optimised, either that or just how the OS runs is not as efficient as iOS or Windows Phone. Also, tbh the rest of the manufacturers do NOTHING like what apple does (i.e. design their own chips). 

Point in cas eis if You tried runningcurrent android on any of your yester years phone (custom root etcetc) I can assure you they do not and will not run as smooth even bloat free and freshly flashed.

Meanwhile, my Lumia 920 can run Windows 10 mobile (albiet buggy) not as bad as a andriod S4 phone running Lolipop (if theres such a thing)

 

Very good point, this is going to take a lot more for Google and the like to sort. They need to get together, make a high performing OS and drivers so that they don't need ridiculously powerful (and of course, highly priced) hardware to power it. This is definitely where Apple have the advantage.

 

Having said that on designing their own chips, Samsung manufacture a lot for Apple so they are capable of manufacture of their own chips at least? 

 

Google started getting somewhere with Project Butter. They just need to keep it going!

[VerticalDiscussions]

-snip-

Oh god -.- now every other phone will burn... Because of "fanboyism" 

[Daegun]

My question is, does this use a considerably larger amount of power than normal storage similar to nvme SSDs in desktops? If not, huzzah!

If so, it's still nice, but less so when combined with the dismal battery they've given it.

Personally I don't care for this at this moment in time, but I probably will want faster storage eventually, so kudos to Apple for actually pushing something early.

[Ex14]

Very good point, this is going to take a lot more for Google and the like to sort. They need to get together, make a high performing OS and drivers so that they don't need ridiculously powerful (and of course, highly priced) hardware to power it. This is definitely where Apple have the advantage.

 

Having said that on designing their own chips, Samsung manufacture a lot for Apple so they are capable of manufacture of their own chips at least? 

 

Google started getting somewhere with Project Butter. They just need to keep it going!

Its the lack of control on the OEMs and the kind of HW they're allowed to use. its the same reason why macs seem to work more smoothly than windows. theres just so many  different permuntations, and limiting hardware choices would mean less partners and hence more os competitiors for Google. its a lose lose.

They do manufacture their own chips? but even then they can;t refine and make it to fit andriod the same way apple does. they don;t control how the os evolves so...

Project butter is not it. Project butter just makes it run smoother to the user. but how the apps run etcetc is a very different matter.

 

[peanutsrevenge]

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. 

Apple haven't properly been expanding their storage for MANY generations and still charge an obscene amount of money for the options available.

 

The price difference between ACHI and NVMe is negligible, with 3D NAND the cost is substantially reduced and much bigger capacities should be available for less than the currently pathetic 'biggest one'.

But, I guess when a company spends more on marketing than anything, we already know it's going to be a shitty product, especially when compared to the image painted in their marketing BS.

[79wjd]

Apple haven't properly been expanding their storage for MANY generations and still charge an obscene amount of money for the options available.

 

The price difference between ACHI and NVMe is negligible, with 3D NAND the cost is substantially reduced and much bigger capacities should be available for less than the currently pathetic 'biggest one'.

But, I guess when a company spends more on marketing than anything, we already know it's going to be a shitty product, especially when compared to the image painted in their marketing BS.

Understand that Apple is still a business, and charging less would be silly. And don't for a minute think that Motorola/HTC/One Plus/etc... would do it to if they could get away with it, but they can't. So criticizing Apple for their pricing structure isn't entirely fair -- sure you might not be happy paying what they're asking for, but they have no reason to lower it. 

 

iPhones are also far from being shitty products. The only downside is the cost and memory capacity, and as I said, there is no reason to change either; plus for the majority of users the capacities aren't an issue. 

[warmmilk]

I don't see why a phone needs such fast storage?  I never felt that was the bottle neck with any phone I had.  for a phone specifically I'd prefer a bit slower flash storage and more of it.  whats the point of having such fast storage if you're never gonna see a difference in it with how your phone runs?

[juretrn]

SSD? more like NAND flash chips...

[ChasingPluto]

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. 

It's because Apple knows most of its users won't understand what they're saying or care

[79wjd]

I don't see why a phone needs such fast storage?  I never felt that was the bottle neck with any phone I had.  for a phone specifically I'd prefer a bit slower flash storage and more of it.  whats the point of having such fast storage if you're never gonna see a difference in it with how your phone runs?

My guess would be for 4k/4k editing since Apple really emphasizes that you can shoot and edit 4k right from your phone. 

 

 

It's because Apple knows most of its users won't understand what they're saying or care

I'd actually say it's because they don't want the user to know or think about the backend/implementation. So if I had to guess it was added to improve editing for higher bit rate files (like 4k)/other, so they proudly say that you can shoot and edit straight from your phone (thereby referencing this change without burdening the user with useless information). Relative comparisons are far better for the average user than absolutes. 

 

 

 

EDIT: I don't know if the NVMe ssd helps with 4k editing as I don't know what bitrate the device is using, it's simply an example. 

[peanutsrevenge]

Understand that Apple is still a business, and charging less would be silly. And don't for a minute think that Motorola/HTC/One Plus/etc... would do it to if they could get away with it, but they can't. So criticizing Apple for their pricing structure isn't entirely fair -- sure you might not be happy paying what they're asking for, but they have no reason to lower it. 

 

iPhones are also far from being shitty products. The only downside is the cost and memory capacity, and as I said, there is no reason to change either; plus for the majority of users the capacities aren't an issue. 

 

I really hate that pathetic excuse, "It's a business, its purpose is to constantly extract wealth from the masses and pile it into the pockets of the few and DAMN IT, I'm going to defend anyone who questions that!!".

 

[LAwLz]

Its the lack of control on the OEMs and the kind of HW they're allowed to use. its the same reason why macs seem to work more smoothly than windows. theres just so many  different permuntations, and limiting hardware choices would mean less partners and hence more os competitiors for Google. its a lose lose.

They do manufacture their own chips? but even then they can;t refine and make it to fit andriod the same way apple does. they don;t control how the os evolves so...

Project butter is not it. Project butter just makes it run smoother to the user. but how the apps run etcetc is a very different matter.

I really hate when people say this because it is not true.

 

Works on less hardware does not mean it is more "optimized". Very limited hardware configurations is not the reason why "macs seems to work more smoothly than Windows" (which I strongly disagree with by the way) because Apple intentionally cripples compatibility with other hardware. It's not optimizations that hinders OS X from running on whatever hardware you want. Apple deliberately puts in effort to make it so that it works on less hardware.

 

 

A great example of how bullshit this argument is is the fact that the iPhone 6+ and 6S+ does not run at their native resolution (it runs at 2208x1242), because iOS simply does not support 1920x1080. Apple had to work around this limitation by having the phone render everything at a higher resolution internally and then scale it down. Does that sound like being optimized to you?

 

The reason why for example iOS seems smooth is because of very powerful hardware (very very powerful. The iPhones usually has as good or better specs than top tier Android phones), and lots and lots of tricks and cheats. For example when you launch an app in iOS the app will appear to be fully loaded before it actually is. That's because the app loads an image of for example a menu screen while the actual menu is being loaded. Wanna know why iOS has a limit on how much moment scrolling can build up? Because it prevents users from scrolling faster than the CPU can keep up. It makes the OS seem smoother when it actually just prevents you from doing things it's not fast enough to handle.

[79wjd]

I really hate that pathetic excuse, "It's a business, its purpose is to constantly extract wealth from the masses and pile it into the pockets of the few and DAMN IT, I'm going to defend anyone who questions that!!".

 

Yeah, those evil bastards, how dare they not just give money away. 

 

Get off your high horse and learn a valuable lesson. You'd have to be an idiot to sell something for less than what you can easily sell it for. The only reason to lower the cost of a product is to increase sales, however if the good is inelastic (i.e. lowering the price won't increase revenue) then there is no justifiable reason to lower the price. 

 

Aside from the fact that Apple, as a company, shouldn't lower prices, it's share holders/board members would fire any CEO that would intentionally decrease profits for no justifiable reason. So blame any share holder just as much as you blame Apple itself. 

[burnttoastnice]

I think that it's great to see that Apple just simply doesn't skimp on their phones and tablets and is able to offer the very best every year for the past 3 years. Of course, the real world benefit of such fast storage may not show as much of a benefit, but it's good to see something new and fresh to be excited about.

 

It's great, but meh, 99% of iPhone users won't be using their phone for tasks that will require that kind of speed. I don't even think the iphone have any applications or use cases that will benefit from that type of speed. GTA maybe, and nothing/little more. The majority of storage usage will probably just be whatsapp and other messaging services storing incoming messages and data.

Personally I'd prefer big, slow storage. Slow as in minimum 70MB/s read, 20MB/s write if it's gonna be a MMC chip in a low-end device.

 

wut? a sandisk SSD? ifixit teardown show it was using a toshiba chip on the 16gb version, my guess this is exclusive to the 64 and 128gb iphones

 

lol a 16GB NVMe ssd makes so much sense on a phone

[peanutsrevenge]

 

Aside from the fact that Apple, as a company, shouldn't lower prices, it's share holders/board members would fire any CEO that would intentionally decrease profits for no justifiable reason. So blame any share holder just as much as you blame Apple itself. 

 

nevermind, I'm too bad of a mood for this.

[Curufinwe_wins]

snip

The tricks it uses are pretty hilarious for certain.

[Ex14]

I really hate when people say this because it is not true.

 

Works on less hardware does not mean it is more "optimized". Very limited hardware configurations is not the reason why "macs seems to work more smoothly than Windows" (which I strongly disagree with by the way) because Apple intentionally cripples compatibility with other hardware. It's not optimizations that hinders OS X from running on whatever hardware you want. Apple deliberately puts in effort to make it so that it works on less hardware.

 

You totally missed my point. 

I working on less hardware just means less permutations/ less possible avenue on bugs. I did noit say windows run any less smooth (windows 10 is hella smooth) but its open to ALOT of bugs due to having different components, from RAM, power delivery, processor, Image DSP and so on. Note I said SEEM to be. not a definite. Also the down sampling IS a optimisation. How isit not? you get slightly better fidelity than a native 1080 icon/render they do this for their macs too, and it is what makes their scaling much better than windows. Infact shouldn;t you give them props they can make it run that well with the specs they have?

Also, being able to design their own chip AND write their own software should account for something (imo) being able to fine tune the processor to work best with the code they write etcetc This is based purely on speculation on my end but I feel Nvidia Game works show what i mean best.

Whatever they do, be it loading that image, or other restrictions do add to that user experience i woudl say that those are "optimisations" to the user experience. They optimised it to seem faster. Whether or not its actually faster doesn;t reall;y  matter if the desired end result (the user) feels it is.

[ShadowCaptain]

it actually just prevents you from doing things it's not fast enough to handle.

 

This is a good thing, the system is "optimized" to run in a specific way.. in the way that 99% of its users will use it 99% of the time

 

OSX and iOS are designed to run how most people use their machines, these "cheats" mean that for most of its customers they get the feeling of smoothness, which is arguably more important than the actual speed 

 

I would rather use a web browser with a limited scrolling speed that feels ultra slick and smooth and a pleasure to use, than one that lets me scroll infinity fast, but goes all blocky and jittery when in use 

 

(just an example)

[LAwLz]

Also the down sampling IS a optimisation. How isit not? you get slightly better fidelity than a native 1080 icon/render they do this for their macs too, and it is what makes their scaling much better than windows.

So you're saying iOS is "optimized" because it doesn't even support the resolution Apple's phones are and they have to resort to tricks which makes the devices slower are actually "optimizations"? If they did this on purpose to get higher fidelity then how come they aren't doing it on the non plus models? It's only on the plus models, which just happens to run the resolution iOS does not support.

I don't think I have ever heard someone say running things at the non-native resolutions is optimal before... They don't even upscale/downscale it evenly like they did when they moved to the retina screen (double the amount of pixels in both directions). It's crap.

 

They don't do this on their Macs and it is completely unrelated to why scaling on OS X is better. The reason why scaling is better on OS X is simply because third party developers have put in more effort to support it than on Windows. The backbone of what makes scaling work is not better on OS X than on Windows. What they do on iOS is render things at 2208x1242 and then downscale to 1920x1080. They don't do that on OS X.

 

 

Infact shouldn;t you give them props they can make it run that well with the specs they have?

They don't deserve any props for it. What they deserve props for is making really good hardware. For some reason people think the iPhone has bad specs because they blindly look at core count and frequency. Core count and frequency are terrible ways of measure performance. It seems to be common knowledge regarding desktop components (AMD vs Intel) but when it comes to phones and tablets every seems to have forgotten that.

 

Their CPU cores are fantastic. They are really high performance.

The GPUs they use has always been ridiculously powerful. It was only quite recently Qualcomm and ARM managed to catch up with PowerVR. It wasn't uncommon that the GPU in the iPhones were 2-3 times as powerful as in other phones.

 

Saying that the iPhone runs great for having such low end specs is like saying a system with i7-6700K and a Titan X runs great for having such low end hardware, because the Xbone has twice the cores but can't keep up (just an analogy, I am not saying Android phones are like Xbones or iPhones are like Titan Xs).

 

 

So I will give them props for having great hardware. Not for having great software because quite frankly I think iOS is terrible for a wide variety of reasons (such as the lack of dynamic scaling which forces Apple to use hacks to even get things working on the plus models).

 

 

 

 

Also, being able to design their own chip AND write their own software should account for something (imo) being able to fine tune the processor to work best with the code they write etcetc This is based purely on speculation on my end but I feel Nvidia Game works show what i mean best.

It helps sometimes, but it is not like they design the CPU to work with the OS or vice versa. It helps because they can for example move to 64bit in a cleaner manner (change all their software to 64bit at the same time they move the CPU to 64bit). It's not like they write the OS in assembly and manually map everything to specific addresses and functions.

 

 

 

Whatever they do, be it loading that image, or other restrictions do add to that user experience i woudl say that those are "optimisations" to the user experience. They optimised it to seem faster. Whether or not its actually faster doesn;t reall;y  matter if the desired end result (the user) feels it is.

This is a good thing, the system is "optimized" to run in a specific way.. in the way that 99% of its users will use it 99% of the time

 

OSX and iOS are designed to run how most people use their machines, these "cheats" mean that for most of its customers they get the feeling of smoothness, which is arguably more important than the actual speed 

 

I would rather use a web browser with a limited scrolling speed that feels ultra slick and smooth and a pleasure to use, than one that lets me scroll infinity fast, but goes all blocky and jittery when in use 

 

(just an example)

I agree. I just want people to know that there is a difference between perceived performance and actual performance.

People have this weird idea that Apple employ warlocks that forges the OS and hardware using the arts of black magic which makes it better than Android. The answer to why iOS seems to perform so much better isn't "the OS is so good. Software is so important!". It's because of tricks that makes users perceive it to be smoother, and because they actually put in really high performance hardware in their devices. On top of those things, Google also decided to use Java for Android which has some performance impacts (the garbage collector can cause lag spikes and apps has to be compiled at run time, both of these things are more or less fixed with ART though).

 

Another example of these tricks to make it seem smoother is very long animations. For example when you pressed the home button all apps came flying in from the side, or when you opened an app it came flying towards the screen. It wasn't until fairly recently that you could shorten the animation time. That's because Apple wanted to buy time for things to load. Now that the hardware is better they allow users to shorten the animations since it no longer needs as much time.

And I don't think there is anything wrong with these things. I just want people to know that it does not involve witchcraft.

[Ex14]

So you're saying iOS is "optimized" because it doesn't even support the resolution Apple's phones are and they have to resort to tricks which makes the devices slower are actually "optimizations"? If they did this on purpose to get higher fidelity then how come they aren't doing it on the non plus models? It's only on the plus models, which just happens to run the resolution iOS does not support.

I don't think I have ever heard someone say running things at the non-native resolutions is optimal before... They don't even upscale/downscale it evenly like they did when they moved to the retina screen (double the amount of pixels in both directions). It's crap.

 

They don't do this on their Macs and it is completely unrelated to why scaling on OS X is better. The reason why scaling is better on OS X is simply because third party developers have put in more effort to support it than on Windows. The backbone of what makes scaling work is not better on OS X than on Windows. What they do on iOS is render things at 2208x1242 and then downscale to 1920x1080. They don't do that on OS X.

Oh...but they do do that on OS X.

 

If you select the 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200 scaling modes, Apple actually renders the desktop at 2x the selected resolution (3360 x 2100 or 3840 x 2400, respectively), scales up the text and UI elements accordingly so they aren’t super tiny (backing scale factor = 2.0), and downscales the final image to fit on the 2880 x 1800 panel. The end result is you get a 3360 x 2100 desktop, with text and UI elements the size they would be on a 1680 x 1050 desktop, all without sacrificing much sharpness/crispness thanks to the massive supersampling. The resulting image isn’t as perfect as it would be at the default setting because you have to perform a floating point filter down to 2880 x 1800, but it’s still incredibly good.

 - Link

 

 

They don't deserve any props for it. What they deserve props for is making really good hardware. For some reason people think the iPhone has bad specs because they blindly look at core count and frequency. Core count and frequency are terrible ways of measure performance. It seems to be common knowledge regarding desktop components (AMD vs Intel) but when it comes to phones and tablets every seems to have forgotten that.

 

Their CPU cores are fantastic. They are really high performance.

The GPUs they use has always been ridiculously powerful. It was only quite recently Qualcomm and ARM managed to catch up with PowerVR. It wasn't uncommon that the GPU in the iPhones were 2-3 times as powerful as in other phones.

 

Saying that the iPhone runs great for having such low end specs is like saying a system with i7-6700K and a Titan X runs great for having such low end hardware, because the Xbone has twice the cores but can't keep up (just an analogy, I am not saying Android phones are like Xbones or iPhones are like Titan Xs).

 

 

So I will give them props for having great hardware. Not for having great software because quite frankly I think iOS is terrible for a wide variety of reasons (such as the lack of dynamic scaling which forces Apple to use hacks to even get things working on the plus models).

 

It helps sometimes, but it is not like they design the CPU to work with the OS or vice versa. It helps because they can for example move to 64bit in a cleaner manner (change all their software to 64bit at the same time they move the CPU to 64bit). It's not like they write the OS in assembly and manually map everything to specific addresses and functions.

this weird idea that Apple employ warlocks that forges the OS and hardware using the arts of black magic which makes it better than Android. The answer to why iOS seems to perform so much better isn't "the OS is so good. Software is so important!". It's because of tricks that makes users perceive it to be smoother, and because they actually put in really high performance hardware in their devices. On top of those things, Google also decided to use Java for Android which has some performance impacts (the garbage collector can cause lag spikes and apps has to be compiled at run time, both of these things are more or less fixed with ART though).

No doubt apple's processor is pretty swell. Heck even their gpu too. But I still think its mostly their code which allows to run as well as it is. Think of AMD's DX11 Driver situation as compared to Nvidia. Also see low end windows phone with 512 mb of ram. MY buddy had flashed an ipod to run andriod too, and man it wasn't pretty at all. These examples has shown and led me to believe its mostly code at these points. you yourself have brought up androids performance pitfalls. So yea Apple Hardware is good. /but I still believe that it's the code which allows for it to perform this well.

[ShadowCaptain]

SNIP

 

Then yes I absolutely agree, iOS/OSX are not some special software that magically make a processor run twice as fast just because its on Apples OS, they are just cleverly designed to make everything run and feel smooth fast and fluid