Alright, so to start off. I get it, you guys hate Apple products. Though some of us have had pretty annoying and terrible experience with Android; some have had great experiences with android, and the same goes with Apple. I'm not trying to say that one is better than the other. I'm just going to simply state that each phone serves its purpose and that hardware specs and benchmarks doesn't necessarily mean better performance on real day to day usage.
I've had the phone now for a whole week and I've used the phone quite extensively in as many scenarios that i would use. The main reason that i didn't go for the iPhone 6 plus was mainly because i flat out can't stand these phablets. IMO i prefer smaller phones, to me a 4" is adequate enough, but i was willing to step up to 4.7" which is not too much of a major difference. Also when it comes to the mobile market in the business world Apple is a little more embraced than Blackberry and Android at the moment; that may change at any moment but i want to have a phone with minimal issues.
Hardware:
As i'm pretty sure everyone know, the hardware specs is something that Apple guys will brag about when you consider the Android market having a little more than double the performance on the hardware level. Respectably i have to say that i was very skeptical when i heard the hardware specs but others can argue that any phone may be obsolete withing 3-6 months. Not like a computer having the dominance of 1 year and in the high end market having 2 years. I'm actually quite surprised at how the CPU and Co-Processor relay tasks and functions to one another. I had an iPhone 5 and then later went with a Moto X (1st gen). If you jump from the iPhone 5s i can understand that the 6 is not a great leap in performance but if you are an iPhone 5 user, this is a good upgrade and a VERY noticeable upgrade, almost to the point of feeling like this is a whole new device from top to bottom and it feels like it.
Touch ID IMO is really great, i love unlocking with my thumb, logging on apps and website, i recently just tried Apple Pay over at Target and really enjoyed it. The Fingerprint scanner is quite a nice feature and i'd like to see how well it will be integrated in the future. The antenna is a big upgrade as well, i'm really surprised why Apple didn't really talk about it. Now that the antenna is directly linked to the Co-processor, it seems that battery life has increased a little bit and the performance is a bit better; about 20% increase in download and upload speeds. The microphone and speakers are nice upgrade, it does quite a lot better than the iPhone 5 and you don't have that "bathroom echo" reverb effect anymore which is a nice welcome thing. I've asked a good number of people about the call quality and everyone felt like they were talking to someone on a landline.
The camera on paper sounded as if it was going to be a minuscule upgrade. Good thing i was wrong, the camera IMO for an 8MP camera has a fantastic color reproduction, great white balance and exposure levels right out of the box. HDR is WAY better now and much more accurate at reproducing warm color environments so for day time this is IMO as good as color accuracy can get for a phone(The Moto X in comparison was a little washed out and the sharpness was lacking, the only android phone that i've seen as good as the iPhone 6 is the One+ but that's because there's a Sony CMOS Sensor in there which is golden). During low light, they did a massive upgrade...maybe it's the f stop settings or their shutter speeds adjustments but for stock settings it produces really beautiful images. Even the flash feels much better with the adition of 2 more LED's, it does half yellow and half white flash which is really interesting. It works great at balancing colors from the ground to the sky during night time. Now if you're a camera guy, you might want to buy the Camera+ or CameraPro App which is only $2.00 in the App Store. The display IMO is what Apple has down perfect from the 4 series and on. The Retina display has 100% sRGB screen which looks beautiful. My only complaint about it is when you have the sun hitting the screen, the brightness is just not high enough to fully compensate like the Samsung, Motorolla, and HTC flagship phones.
The battery seems like it has slightly improved, but the OS is so well optimized with the co-processor that it vastly improved drain time while doing phone calls and running music. Overall from the specs apple posted, it seems like it's on par with what they say. Overall it feels at the end of the day i have 20% more battery life than my iPhone 5, people with the 5s won't see much of an improvement because the co-processor existed then. That little chip really improves things. Trust me, I've tried to really beat up that battery. Running spotify, while surfing the web, text messaging, checking e-mails and i definitely see the difference.
Performance:
Now this is the part that i may get a ton of crap from the Android community. The performance on iOS IMO is perfect with the hardware. In Single threaded performance, it seems like it keeps up with any of the flagship devices when it comes to benchmarks. All the apps perform so well, and are held at a much higher standard because of the requirements of be able to create applications for iOS. I really wish Google would take a page out of Apples book on making stricter requirements to post applications in their store, but then on the other hand it's hard to say that because of the vast hardware variations with different devices and this is mainly why Apples phones have better performing applications over Google. iOS App creators really only have to focus on 2 or 3 devices while on Android it can be lets say 50 devices and that makes a major issue with them. When it comes to proprietary apps, iOS does fairly well. Chrome has some issues with hogging RAM which kind of sucks because there's only 1GB of RAM which i really wish Apple made it 2GB. Mainly because of that, the user is almost forced to use Safari (is not really a bad browser for iOS) because Safari is very well optimized to run lean. Multi Tasking on iOS 8 is really fluid now. I notice that my RAM usage is lower now because it does a better job at leaving apps in sleep states when switching. The double tap function now doesn't lag anymore like it did on iOS 7 which feels great. So multi-tasking is pretty much seamless now. the WiFi antenna has been improved too so i definitely now can get the full benefit of wireless AC (wow AC is sooooooooooo fast and has such a great range now, no more dropped bars in my house or even down the street to get my mail).
Here's something that use to really bug the hell out of me; and it was whenever i first initially start scrolling on a browser or application. On android I've never seen a single device that can do it without that initially hop or skip. With every apple device I've recently tried (4 series and up) it is fluid. No skipping, no hopping, or any of those weird laggy moments. I understand that the skips are usually because the phones are trying to conserve power so it throttles down, for a general consumer, they won't understand that and it may annoy some people. Most of my friends hate that little skip. If you keep the phone running at full power the skip is gone on android, but that compromises battery life. It's nice to see that the programming team are looking at those little details because it shows that programmers still care about QC. Now i'm not saying that everything on iOS is programmer really well, there are some faults. For example, when you initially turn on the device, the WiFI and Bluetooth are initiated no matter what. The Mail app doesn't refresh automatically which means you have to manually go on the app to check emails every single time. Even the Gmail app is like that which i really wish wasn't because i'd like to get notified whenever emails pop up.
The keyboard has vastly improved from the 5s. If you're upgrading from the 5, you won't see much of a difference, the touch sensor was accurate, but on the 5s i heard a lot of stupid little things that it did. I really wish that the support on the 3rd party app wasn't so lackluster. I really hope Swiftkey gets a big upgrade because i really enjoy using the word trail function, i definitely type much faster with that little feature and i miss that on android, i use to type faster than most people do with their keyboards with one hand which is astounding IMO.
OS:
When it comes to overall OS performance, it's a nice thing on the iPhone. The OS is very mature, with minimal issues during my scenarios. Every app function beautifully and i still have yet to experience a single crash. Now i heard a lot of people had issues during 8.0 and 8.0.2 but i jumped directly to 8.1 so i never saw those issues. Personally i don't care about multiple desktops because to me when i had android i just used 1 desktop for time reading, calender, and email highlights. I always used the App Drawer to open up apps. Using iOS isn't much different from the way i use it so i don't really miss those features. I get it that a lot of people in this community love the customization of Android, and i get it. For the people that don't care about those things, iOS does a great job. Especially when it comes to iPhone to iPhone communication with Facetime, Messanger, Air Drop, and Game Center. There's a serious game community in Game Center which is really interesting. If you buy an iPhone 6 or 6+ now they bundle iMovie, Garage Band, and iWorks along with it free of charge which is a great addition. The prior devices you had to pay about $20 for all of that. Apple Pay is really cool, i definitely would like to see where they lead with this concept. Apple really sets up a trend in the business world because of the adoption to iPhone. All the major banks accept Apple Pay, and the major stores are starting to utilize it as well.
Conclusion and Future views:
Personally i find the iPhone 6 great for any user that just wants a simple, no bloatware, just pick up and go type of phone. The performance is really great considering the specs and the OS utilization of all the parts. If this hardware was on android, i doubt it would perform that well. Yet Android is about to launch Lollipop's ART so things might change and Android might become optimized just as well as iOS is to their phone. For now i think for the overall package, it's a great device.
With the #bendgate fiasco, i can understand the worry but we have to look at it respectfully, and it's that if you're a user that beats up your phone, drops it, and neglects it a bit, then the iPhone will bend on you. I'm someone that takes care of my stuff, so we'll see if i encounter any sort of bending issues. I'll post updates if i encounter any issues.
I would definitely like to see Apple push for a world where wallets are a thing of the past and that your cell phone will have everything you need. It seems like they're trying to lead to that from what they've been doing with iOS 7 and on. Another thing i'd like to see is how they will handle the whole smart watch. Their watch IMO is a little too bulky and with Android Wear and Moto 360 out already and looking beautiful it's really hard to buy the Apple Watch. At the moment Android and Apple have their watch ecosystem closed off to only work with their own OS. The only smart watch out there is the Pebble which i don't really like. We'll see what apple has up their sleeve.
If you guys have any questions, i'll try my best to respond to them. If you guys want to check out some video reviews, i'd definitely tell you guys to go look for MKBHD for his review. He did a really great job and with no bias which is really great. So many android fanboys don't care about anything more than hardware specs, it's not always about hardware specs but more so the entire package.