(credit: Apple)
Many consumer electronics companies, Apple included, use parts sourced from multiple manufacturers to meet demand for their products. You can make and sell more iPhones if you're buying screens from two companies, and that also insulates you from risk if there's something wrong with one company's components. Parts sourced from multiple manufacturers will inevitably behave a little differently, but as long as the differences are small people aren't really going to notice or care.
This is the kind of manufacturing nitty-gritty that doesn't usually make headlines, but in the case of the iPhone 6S, people have suddenly become concerned. Apple is sourcing an important system component, the Apple A9 system-on-a-chip, from both Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). This is something that it normally doesn't do, since manufacturing processes from different chipmakers can have different performance and power consumption even when the chip's design is identical.
And that's just what some iPhone 6S and 6S Plus buyers have run into. Using an app that has since been pulled from the App Store, some users were able to determine which chip individual iPhones were using, and found that the phones with Samsung chips had significantly lower battery life than the phones with TSMC chips in certain tests. The findings got enough attention that Apple offered a rare comment on the situation, claiming that the test being used wasn't representative of actual use and that in "real-world usage" the difference between iPhone models with any combination of components was no more than 2 to 3 percent.
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