Design and feel
The iPhone 6 feels good in the hand. The textured aluminum back is soft and cool. It’s not cold and metallic like the iPhone 5. The rounded edges help a lot. At this size, an angular design like its predecessor’s would dig into your hands and feel uncomfortable.
That said, I miss the unique industrial design of the 5. With its sharp steel band, it felt distinctive. It had personality. Pick it up, and you knew immediately it was an iPhone 5. No mistaking it. No other phone felt like it.
In comparison, the 6 is soft and forgiving. It’s a lot more, well, feminine. That might have been the intention of Jony Ive’s design team: The new iPhone must appeal to both sexes.
I like the way the screen has a rounded bezel at the edge. It’s not only easier to hold, it’s more sophisticated than a flat piece of glass. It’s more lux, like a subtly curved luxury car.
The build quality is second to none. The tolerances are minute. There are no gaps whatsoever between the different parts. It’s tight to the nth degree. The screen appears almost contiguous with the aluminum shell. There’s not enough gap to slide even the sharpest blade between them. The SIM card slot looks like one of Tolkien’s magic doors that blend into the mountainside until hit by a moonbeam.
It’s even hard to see how the iPhone 6 has been assembled. The only clues are the two tiny screws on the bottom, on either side of the slot for the Lightning charger.
There’s a satisfying precision to the metal parts. The speaker grille holes and headphone jack have been finely and precisely machined. There’s no visible opening for the volume buttons, which are now recessed. They feel solid and work with a satisfying click.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
We’ve been testing the gold model, with 64GB of memory. (Storage options are 16GB, 64GB and 128GB.) The extra room of the 128GB model has been welcomed like the second coming, and it’s going to be a popular option, while the 16GB at the low end seems skimpy and bizarre. It’s barely enough room for a couple of apps and some photos. Apple hasn’t explained the rationale, but perhaps there’s a significant segment of the buying public that doesn’t need storage and appreciates the $100 price difference. (I know a few people who haven’t downloaded a single app to their iPhones, and never run out of space.)
Personally, I’ve survived for years with 32GB, so 64 seems like a vast, empty estate. But you always fill up the space you have. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly my kids fill it up with hi-def, slo-mo videos.
The gold color is subtle — it’s no Vegas bathroom — though I prefer the quiet refinement of the silver and space grey. I’m not a big fan of the plastic banding on the back for the antennas. Too Tron.
The phone is large but I’ve had no pocket issues. True, I wear misshapen baggy jeans with giant pockets. My skinny-jeans days are long over. However, the kids put the phone in their skinny jeans, and it fit, although my son’s leg looked like a boa that had swallowed a mattress.
There’s no issue lifting the phone to my face to talk. The larger 6 Plus can feel like you are talking on an iPad, but the smaller 6 isn’t unnatural or dorky in any way.
The 6 is mad thin — a mere 6.9 mm, about the same as a checkbook. It’s even thinner than the 5s, which itself was a svelte 7.6 mm. The new phone weighs just a little more than the 5s (129 grams versus 112 grams), but it’s barely there. It’s half the weight of my empty coffee cup (according to my rough estimate). Apple has been on a long march to make the iPhone ever thinner and lighter, and this has got to be at some kind of limit, although I’m sure we’ve said that in the past. How thin can it get?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-ySFXBbOyE&feature=youtu.be
