Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Stephen Fry: a thick skin when it comes to Apple-haters.
Stephen Fry: a thick skin when it comes to Apple-haters. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/REX
Stephen Fry: a thick skin when it comes to Apple-haters. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/REX

Stephen Fry's iPhone 6 verdict: the most exquisite mobile ever made

This article is more than 9 years old

Apple’s matchless design and innovation team has produced two ravishing devices. Being first isn’t the point, being the best is

Since January 1984, when I bought my first Apple Macintosh, through the dark late 1980s and mid-90s, when the company had just 3% of the personal computer market, I have developed the thickest of skins when it comes to Apple-haters.

I could fill this entire article with links to ancient, now embarrassing, sneers: “What’s the point of an iPod?”; “The iPhone is too large”; “Huh, the iPad is nothing but a big iPhone?” (right, and a swimming pool is nothing but a big bath). “How disgraceful are the working conditions in which Apple devices are manufactured!” – oddly leaving out Samsung, Sony, Dell, LG, HTC and all the other companies who have their devices made in the same factories.

I welcome, love, revere and adore Android, Windows and any other mobile operating system. The richer the market, the better for all. I’ve never thought anyone pretentious for owning a BlackBerry or an LG G Flex, but when it comes to Apple, it’s open season. “Baaah you’re all sheep,” or “Huh, far more Samsungs are sold anyway!” Can’t have it both ways, darlings …

Apple has often innovated, but being first to the market is not the point or focus of the corporation: the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, iPhones came late to multitasking. “We wanted to wait until we had the best smartphone multitasking system in the world,” Steve Jobs said on unveiling the iOS 4 operating system in 2010, and no one can doubt his team achieved that goal.

Regarding the dimensions, many Android owners will point out how late the Cupertino company has come to the size game. But once again, Apple wanted to wait until it got the perfect merger of processor, battery life, resolution, materials and OS workarounds. Being first isn’t the point, being the best is.

The 6 is 4.7in measured diagonally, the 6 Plus is 5.5in, yet both are lighter than the 5s (which was 4in in size): more high-res, more powerful, and offer equal or better battery life in all metrics. Personal fitness is becoming a big issue: the addition of a barometer into the phones allows the new bundled health app to distinguish height, climbs, and stairs as well as all the other sporty parameters.
These phones – in silver, gold or “space grey” – are utterly gorgeous objects in the hand and to the eye. They are released with the superb iOS 8 – an operating system leap forward for the iPhone and iPad, blessedly backwardly compatible all the way down to the 4S.

The matchless design and innovation team led by Jony Ive – who has headhunted to Apple the brilliant Australian designer Marc Newson (over whom at the launch I spilled some horrible green wheatgrass and spirulina drink that would otherwise have gone all over P Diddy) – has produced two devices of absolutely exquisite dimensions, heft and feel. I have played with both for a week and cannot decide which I would keep.

Under the bonnet, they each offer a ravishing Retina HD display. The Plus has more pixels and the (real) advantage of optical camera shake correction rather than digital. There’s also full HD video allowing a devastatingly cool 720p slowmo that will make Matrix directors of us all. At 5.5in, the 6 Plus is, to my large hands, absolutely ideal, but then for most users I would recommend the 6. I now type faster on each, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.

The keyboard word-prediction table – open to other developers to refine – can only improve as companies like Britain’s SwiftKey, so hugely successful already on Android, add an iOS app complete with their already compendious idiolect dictionaries, which will allow you to text or type as if you are Dickens or Doctors Johnson or Dre. There’s barely space for me to talk about the extraordinary new Wi-Fi calling option, which allows you to hold a conversation using wireless at home or the office and continue seamlessly as you move out of WiFi range – allowing the LTE (4G) mobile network (EE in the UK’s case) to take over without a blip with Voiceover LTE.

It only needs for me to leave with the confident prediction that these phones will prove through sales, as I believe them to be, the best and most beautiful mobile telecom technology ever yet produced. So sue me if if I’m proved wrong. Oh, and, of course, watch this space …

This article was amended on 17 September 2014. An earlier version referred to Apple having had “all but 3%” of the personal computer market. This has been corrected to “just 3%”.

More on this story

More on this story

  • iPhone 6 review: thinner, faster and slightly cheaper

  • Apple iPhone 6 Plus: it's a very big phone and it feels great - review

  • iOS 8 review: the iPhone and iPad get customised, extended and deepened

  • Apple iPhone 6 review: 'It's going to have a lot of success' - video

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed