iPhone 5s Review

Nobody outside Apple saw the A7 coming. A 64-bit dual-core chip at 1.3 GHz in a phone in September 2013, with the M7 coprocessor handling motion sensing on the side, sent Qualcomm into a public scramble and kept the 5s at the top of every single-thread benchmark for a year. Touch ID, a capacitive fingerprint sensor under a sapphire home button, was the first one on a phone that worked every time, and it is why every phone had one by 2015.

The camera stayed at 8 megapixels but grew the pixels to 1.5 microns behind an f/2.2 lens, added a True Tone dual-LED flash, 120 fps slow motion at 720p and burst mode; the Lumia 1020 out-resolved it, nothing out-pointed-and-shot it. The 4-inch 1136 by 640 panel was excellent and by then small, with the Galaxy S4 at 5 inches and 1080p. The 1560 mAh cell was the weak axis, a day only with care. iOS 7 shipped with its flat redesign and a rough 7.0 that crashed and gave some people motion sickness, then the 5s ran every version through iOS 12 and took security patches until January 2023, the longest life any phone had been given at the time.

Apple ran a replacement programme for a batch of 5s units with faulty batteries sold in the first two months. Launch was $199 on a two-year contract or $649 for the 16GB unlocked, in Space Gray, Silver and the first gold iPhone.