Six reasons why you should buy the new iPhone 6S Plus

Most people will most likely not buy the new iPhone. Even before it hit the stands last week, the pricing of Apple's new flagship was out and it was shocking to say the least. It has a starting price of Rs 62,000 - a premium of Rs 8,500 on the iPhone 6 when it was launched in India last year. The iPhone 6S Plus can cost as much as Rs 92,000. In fact, India is the most expensive place to buy an iPhone 6S. Suffice to say Apple is demanding your limbs for its new hotness. 

For Rs 92,000, you can get a high-end version of the new MacBook Air (and you save some money too, in the process). You could go on a weekend getaway to Dubai and stay in a good hotel. You could pay an EMI for a luxury car. 

Yet, for some, it is only the iPhone that will make sense. Crazy as it sounds - the new iPhone does make sense for a few, including me. It may sound like I am clutching for straws but I have my reason. Allow me to indulge myself:

1.   It is the fastest smartphone in the world. Not by a bit - by a country mile. The new iPhone 6S Plus is so fast that some benchmarks claim it is as fast as a two-year-old MacBook Air. By some metrics, it is even faster than the new MacBook Apple introduced earlier this year. It is capable of some outlandish tasks that you'd traditionally use a work station for.

2.   It will appeal to photographers. The new camera on the iPhone 6S Plus is really good. Unlike other phones, it takes photos with realistic colours, which is something photographers love. Apple has added the ability to shoot 4K videos and the optical stabiliser also works with these videos. Importantly, it is the only phone in the market on which you can edit two streams of 4K video. Remember I said it was fast? Yes, it is that fast.

3.   There is no better phone to play games on. For iOS, developer lay down the red carpet and release their games first on the iPhone and Apple to pays heed to them by offering the most powerful set of tools for games to leverage on. On the new phone, you can get games to look even better than the Xbox 360 console.

4.   Perhaps the biggest new feature of the iPhone 6S Plus is its new pressure sensitive display. It is easy to see eventually how this display technology will change the way we use our phones just the way the first iPhone did. The screen is able to gauge the amount of pressure you have applied and accordingly it will display a new contextual menu if it has been optimised for it. So on the homescreen - you hold the icon of the camera button and it will present four shortcuts, one each for selfies, slow-motion videos, videos and normal photos, not needing you to open the app and navigate it. Inside an app like mail or messages, you can apply pressure on the screen to see previews of emails and even quickly tackle with them. With a bit more pressure, you can directly jump into them. When you apply pressure on the keyboard, it turns into a trackpad, which is a boon for editing documents. It is a subtle thing of the face of it but potentially game changing.

5.   Battery life has always been a problem on iPhones. The iPhone 6S Plus offers the best battery life of any iPhone on the market if you're into that kind of thing. It will last you consistently over 30 hours.

6.   iPhones have historically been fragile phones. The iPhone 6S Plus isn't. It is a heavy monolith but at the same time tough as nails. We accidently dropped it from a height of more than five feet and it came out unscathed with just a minor ding on the side.

PS: The writer is the proud owner of a new 128GB iPhone 6S Plus, which costs Rs 92,000 in India. (Though, he got it for Rs 30,000 less from the US.)