Chipgate debunked: All iPhone 6s models are created equal

A test to pit the two different iPhone 6s models against each other — one with a TSMC chip and the other with a Samsung chip — has officially debunked Chipgate. It turns out there are no discernible differences in battery life between the two.

Consumer Reports acquired an iPhone 6s with an A9 chip made from TSMC and another from Samsung. They made sure all settings were equal on both devices including the carrier, brightness settings, wireless connections, iOS version, running apps and more. Then they got to work.

This wasn’t just your typical play a movie in iTunes until the phone dies type of test. This was pretty scientific. “In one test, for instance, we made the phones transmit at a nominal +10 decibels per milliwatt (dBm) on the same channel in the commonly used Frequency Band 5,” Consumer Reports wrote.

They conducted various other tests involving brightness and usage. One app they ran automatically loaded different web pages in a continuous cycle while music played in the background. The iPhones both handled this for about 11 hours before shutting down. In all of the tests, Consumer Reports found that the difference between each iPhone’s battery life was less than 1 percent by the time both of them turned off.

This means that Chipgate, quite frankly, isn’t real. It probably shouldn’t come as much surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to iPhone releases over the past few years. Who can forget Bendgate in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus last year? And of course 2010’s Antennagate in the iPhone 4 had Android users mocking us mercilessly. Yet, all of these “gates” always wind up being negligible.

The moral of the story here is to not lose sleep over which iPhone 6s you buy because of possibly getting a “bad chip.” The Apple A9 is perfectly capable and delivers virtually identical battery life in all models of the device.

iOS 9: How to Use Split Screen Multitasking and Picture-in-Picture

Apple's iOS 9 includes several new iPad-specific features including Split View multitasking. This is a feature that allows you to run two apps side by side, in a split screen view. This is the first time that true multitasking is available on the iPad, which will please productivity enthusiasts.

We should point out that Split View is available only on the iPad Air 2, iPad Pro and iPad mini 4 at the moment. With Split View though, you can do something like researching a topic while reading a book, or writing a mail while also skimming through Twitter on the side. Here's how you can enable Split View.

1) Open an app that supports Split View. Most built-in apps such as Mail and Notes do. Some third-party apps such as Twitter have also added support for this, and more will very likely do so in the coming days.

2) Swipe from the right edge of the screen. This will open an app in one-third of the screen.

3) Swipe downwards from the top on the right hand side (where the secondary app is open). This will reveal a list of apps.

4) Pick the app you want to run in Split View (such as Safari or Twitter).

5) Now pull the black bar towards the centre of the iPad's screen. You can move the dividing bar to resize the apps.

You can also multitask using the picture-in-picture mode on iOS 9 if you are using iPad Pro, iPad Air or later, and iPad mini 2 or later.

1) To use this open the Videos app and start playing any video.

2) Now tap the picture-in-picture button (see screenshot below) on the bottom pane or simply press the home button while the video is being played.

3) Now the video will start playing in a small window and you can move it around the screen while you continue to use other apps.

You can even resize it to make it bigger or smaller, and even temporarily slide it off the screen so only a small part is visible. This is useful if you want to take notes or browse the Internet while watching videos.