The iPhone 6S will flip six years previous this September, an eternity in cellphone years. If you’ve managed to carry onto one this lengthy, then Apple has some excellent news for you — your cellphone can be eligible for the iOS 15 upgrade when it arrives for the general public this fall. The iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, and first-generation iPhone SE, which all shipped with iOS 9, can be among the many oldest gadgets to obtain the OS replace.
Six years is an awfully lengthy life span for a cell machine, and positively places the 6S within the operating for the longest supported cellphone to this point. The iPhone 5S was 5 years previous when it obtained its final OS replace with iOS 12 however wasn’t eligible for iOS 13. On the Android facet, Samsung has made latest strikes to enhance its machine longevity by providing four years of security support for a few of its telephones. But six years of OS updates and safety assist places the 6S in a completely completely different league.
To be certain, there are loads of new options that received’t work with the 6S’s A9 Bionic processor. Features just like the Google Lens-esque Visual Lookup, Live Text in images, portrait mode in FaceTime, and immersive strolling instructions in Maps received’t be accessible to 6S customers, since all of them require a tool with an A12 Bionic chip a la the XS and XR or later.
It’s additionally potential that newer software program will decelerate an older cellphone with an growing old, much less nimble processor. That won’t essentially be the case, although — each Ars Technica and Macworld discovered no vital influence on efficiency operating iOS 14 on the 6S.
What could also be a much bigger challenge, as each testers famous, is that the 6S exhibits its age with poor battery life. Features like widgets are additionally more durable to make use of on the cellphone’s 4.7-inch display screen, which is quaint in comparison with immediately’s customary six-inch-plus panels. These aren’t a lot compatibility points because the inevitable, sluggish march of time that no gadget can escape.
iPhone 6S house owners shouldn’t despair, although. They’ll nonetheless get doubtlessly helpful updates like notification summaries and Focus modes to attenuate interruptions all through the day, video and music sharing in FaceTime, and added privacy features like a seven-day app privateness report back to maintain tabs on how apps are utilizing your data. There’s additionally the peace of thoughts that comes with operating the newest OS model, and the safety patches and bug fixes that include it all year long. Not a foul deal for a six-year-old machine.