Apple’s New iPhone 5S & iPhone 5C: Everything You Need to Know

Today, Apple once again took the stage to refresh their top-selling device, the iPhone. While Apple only announced this keynote just over a week ago, it seems like the tech community has known about it for months. This is true of not only the keynote itself, but literally everything that was announced! Despite not being entirely surprised, Apple’s announcements were definitely solid, including not one, but two entirely new phones.

With all of the typical Apple Store announcements and other company updates out of the way, Apple dove right into the iPhone announcements. Tim Cook first announced that rather than keeping the iPhone 5 around at a lower price, it will instead be discontinued entirely, and replaced with two entirely new products. The first product detailed in the keynote was the long-rumored iPhone 5c. Here’s everything you need to know about this new, cheaper alternative from Apple:

iPhone 5C 

• Available in five colors (red, blue, yellow, green, and white)

• Packs the same internal specs of the iPhone 5

• Single polycarbonate back piece with lacquer finish

• Re-enforced steel on the inside

• Same 4” Retina Display

• 8MP rear iSight camera

• Front-facing 1.9 µ-pixel FaceTime camera

• 802.11 a/b/g/n 2.4 and 5GHz frequencies

• LTE-ready

• 16GB for $99 and 32GB for $199 on two-year contracts

As you can tell from the features above, this is not quite the cheap iPhone like many people were thinking it would be. While it’s made of plastic on the outside, there is still quite a bit of awesome under the hood. The A6 processor in the iPhone 5 is no slouch, and can still hold it’s own against a lot of the other phones out there in real world tests. The re-enforced steel on the inside not only helps for durability purposes, but also acts as the antenna.

Apple even took it a step further by actually improving the FaceTime camera from what the iPhone 5 offered. While there wasn’t much more added other than the extra colors and the improvement of the Facetime camera, it’s an acceptable upgrade for people that aren’t going for Apple’s flagship phone. While it’s nothing to rush out and sell your iPhone 5 for, existing 4S users or even new Apple customers will have a hard time looking away from this phone. The $99 baseline price is also a nice touch.

Now, it’s time to turn to my main focus; the iPhone 5s. Personally, I think the ‘s’ stands for security this time around, as it’s one of 3 major features that Apple addressed for this phone. Here’s everything you need to know about the iPhone 5s:

iPhone 5S

• New 64-bit A7 system-on-a-chip

• M7 ‘movement coprocessor’

• 2x CPU and graphics performance over iPhone 5

• New 5-element camera system with F/2.2 aperture

• 15% larger active area sensor

• 1.5 micron pixels

• Touch ID fingerprint scanner

The first upgrade that Phil Schiller dove into was the new CPU architecture. This is the first phone in the world that is going fully 64-bit! For the geeks out there, this is a huge step forward. With a 64-bit architecture comes tremendous performance increases, as well as new possibilities for future applications. This new architecture will be handled just as desktop operating systems handle it today; 32-bit and 64-bit apps will be able to run side by side, and will be seamless to the user.

Personally, I’m wondering how much memory we’ll start to see in future phones with 64-bit operating systems, as 64-bit raises the 4GB memory limitation, allowing developers to utilize more memory in the coming years. The M7 movement coprocessor is a cool piece of tech that’s responsible for all movement the phone experiences. Your phone’s gyroscope and accelerometer will provide this co-processor with that information for applications that track your phone’s movement, such as workout applications. By doing this, Apple doesn’t need to fire up the A7 processor, which will help lengthen the phone’s battery life.

The camera in the 5s has some very important upgrades, such as a 15% wider aperture, a dual LED “True Tone” flash that actually changes colors depending on the lighting you’re in, as well as the ability to take photos with larger pixels. These upgrades make the camera not only much faster, but will also make it perform better in both low light and everyday situations. While this isn’t necessarily a feature of the 5s itself, iOS 7 brings some really great software features to this camera, such as “Burst Mode”, and 120FPS video recording.

Burst Mode really demonstrates the power and speed f the A7 chip. Burst mode allows the user to hold the picture button to take 10 pictures every second. While it’s taking these pictures, it analyzes each one in real time to determine any smiles, closed eyes, blurs, or other imperfections in the image. And rather than throwing 40 pictures in your camera roll, it will only keep what it thinks are the ‘best ones’, and will let you select which ones to keep. This new camera system in conjunction with the great software in iOS 7 will make for a fantastic experience.

Last but not least, the iPhone 5s features a new technology called Touch ID. This is a fingerprint scanner that’s built in to the iPhone’s home button. When setting your 5s up for the first time, it will identify your fingerprint. From there, you will then be able to not only unlock your phone just by tapping the home button, but you will also be able to authenticate any App Store or iTunes purchases. This will keep people from needing to re-enter the password for every purchase. This sensor is only as think as a human hair, and lies beneath a sapphire crystal layer on the home button. This sensor can learn new fingerprints, which is great for shared or family phones.  The sensor stores this fingerprint information securely within the A7 chip, which restricts other applications from using it. This fingerprint is also never backed up to the cloud to make sure this information stays safe.

For being Apple’s new flagship phone, this new list of features seems pretty short. However, Apple actually addressed this in the keynote, saying that they don’t put ‘Technology for the sake of technology’ in their devices. They only put in features that they believe will extend and accent the current experience. While I agree with this in many regards, I feel that a few more things could have been added. I have to say that the upgrades that did make it to the phone are big deals. The 64-bit CPU alone has a crazy amount of potential, and is my favorite upgrade to the phone. At the end of the day, the leaks didn’t prevent me from enjoying this keynote. Apple didn’t mention anything about the iPad, Mac Pro, or Mavericks, but there’s plenty of speculation surrounding a future keynote in the next month or to. Be sure to let me know what you thought of Apple’s keynote in the comments below!

About the Author: 

Bob Roche has been producing technology content for about 5 years, including Hackintosh tutorials, PC hardware reviews, and much more. His work can be found at RocheTechnology.com, as well as on his personal YouTube channel.