Went by the Apple Store on Friday at lunch instead of first thing in the morning, which in hindsight was a mistake. Not because I couldn't get a 6s (I'd reserved one online earlier in the week), but because by 12:30 the line for walk-ins wrapped around toward the parking garage and every employee in a blue shirt had that slightly glazed look people get on launch day. iPhone 6s and 6s Plus went on sale Friday the 25th, and judging by my store at least, the rose gold ones were already gone from the walk-in stock by the time I left. A guy behind me in line for the pickup counter said he'd tried three stores that morning looking for rose gold for his wife and struck out at all of them. I don't know if that's an Apple-wide shortage or just bad luck on his part, but it lines up with what I've been seeing on Twitter all weekend.
The headline feature this time around is 3D Touch, which is Apple's name for the screen sensing how hard you're pressing on it. Press lightly on an app icon and you get a little popup menu of shortcuts (they call it "peek and pop" when you use it inside an app to preview a link or an email without fully opening it). Ive used it maybe a dozen times since Friday afternoon and I like it more than I expected to, mostly for jumping straight to the camera from the lock screen. Whether developers actually build anything interesting with it beyond the built in stuff remains to be seen. History with 3D-Touch-shaped features (I'm thinking of Force Touch on the watch) is that adoption from third party apps takes a while.
Live Photos is the other big one: the phone captures a second and a half of video before and after you hit the shutter, so photos have this little flicker of motion when you press on them. It's a neat parlor trick. My daughter thinks it's magic. But nobody's mentioning out loud that these files are roughly twice the size of a normal photo, which brings me to the thing I actually want to complain about.
The 16GB problem, again
Apple still ships the base 6s with 16 gigabytes of storage. Same as the 6. Same as the 5s before that. I paid attention to my own phone this week and a fresh iOS install plus the stock apps already eats close to 5GB before you've taken a single picture, and that's before Live Photos start doubling up your camera roll. Sixteen gigs was tight in 2013. In 2015, with 4K video recording now an option on this very phone, it's close to a joke. The 64GB step-up is $100 more ($749 vs $649 unlocked), which is a real jump for something that should honestly just be the starting tier. I ended up paying it. I always end up paying it, and I complain about it every single time, and Apple keeps not caring, because apparently enough people just pay it too.
Anyway. The camera bump to 12 megapixels is the other change worth mentioning, and photos out of this thing in decent light are genuinely sharp, noticeably better than the 6 in a side by side I did with my brother's phone at dinner Saturday. Low light is still not going to embarrass anyone's dedicated camera, but for a phone it's good.
I'm not going to pretend this is a huge leap over the 6. It isn't, and Apple isn't really claiming it is either — this is the "s" year, same as always, refine what's there rather than reinvent it. The case I bought for the 6 last year still fits, if you were wondering, which is the kind of detail nobody puts in a press release but that actually affects whether you buy a new case or not. Mine's getting a little beat up anyway so I ordered a new one regardless.
Also, completely unrelated, but I noticed over the weekend that half my group chat spent more time arguing about whether rose gold "counts" as a real color choice than they did talking about 3D Touch. People have opinions about phone colors that they will defend more fiercely than actual features. I don't get it, but I also switched to a black case within an hour of opening the box, so maybe I'm not the target audience for the debate either way.