4 Reasons You Need the iPhone 5S and 5 Reasons You Don’t

Welcome to the bifurcated future of Apple smartphones: aluminum vs. polycarbonate, gilded vs. candy-colored, fingerprint scanner vs. fingerprint magnet, 64 bit vs. 32 bit, high end vs. low end, expensive vs. slightly less expensive, iPhone 5S vs. iPhone 5C. Post–Steve Jobs Apple clearly recognizes the one-size-fits-all approach is a losing proposition; add the company’s perpetuation of its now free (with contract) iPhone 4S to the parade, and you’ve got the Cupertino trifecta. Or do you? The iPhone 5C, basically an iPhone 5 wrapped in colorized plastic, while cheaper when viewed as a core iPhone, isn’t as budget-priced as most predicted (predicted being punditry’s euphemism for wishfully projected). And the 3.5-inch (8.9 cm) iPhone 4S, while still competent in the performance department, looks pretty squeezed in 2013 contrasted with the 4-in. (10.2 cm) iPhone 5 family and embiggened phones from competitors like HTC and Samsung. Which leaves the souped-up iPhone 5S. Time to spring for one? Here’s the pros angle: Your contract’s up. Bullet point, meet Captain Obvious. If you’re due for an upgrade, you can get your foot in the door with a 16-GB iPhone 5S for just $199, same as I did when I bought my 16-GB iPhone 5 a year ago. If you’re thinking the $99 16-GB iPhone 5C looks tastier, price-wise, think again — the iPhone 5S’s feature and performance leaps are probably worth at least the $100 gulf. Were I off contract, I’d buy the iPhone 5S in a heartbeat, no ifs, ands or buts. You want to play the most graphically advanced games as smoothly as possible. The A7 processor beating at the core of Apple’s iPhone 5S sounds like a mobile beast. According to Apple, it’s up to twice as fast as the already peppy A6 processor found in the iPhone 5 and utilizes over a billion transistors (without getting any bigger). I’d just be guessing about Infinity Blade III’s performance iPhone to iPhone, since no one’s benchmarked it yet, but doubtless more advanced games are on the way, and if you plan to hold on to