iPhone 5s
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iPhone 5s
Forward thinking.
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| Gold | Silver | Space Gray |
| iPhone 5s — Technical Specifications (Apple Support) | ||
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The iPhone 5s is a smartphone designed and marketed by Apple, and the seventh generation of the iPhone, announced on September 10, 2013, and released on September 20 alongside the iPhone 5c. Behind the iPhone 5's carried-over aluminum design, it landed two industry-shaking firsts: Touch ID, the fingerprint sensor hidden in the home button, and the Apple A7 — the world's first 64-bit smartphone chip, an announcement that reportedly sent competitors' chip roadmaps back to the drawing board.
The "S" additions ran further: an M7 motion coprocessor that tracked steps without waking the CPU, a larger camera sensor with True Tone dual-LED flash, 120 fps slow-motion video, and a new champagne "Gold" finish that promptly became the hardest iPhone to buy. It launched with iOS 7, the operating system's most sweeping visual redesign.
Together with the 5c it sold nine million units in the opening weekend — a record — with the 5s outselling its plastic sibling by every estimate. It remained on sale until March 2016, when the iPhone SE inherited its body, and received software updates from iOS 7 through iOS 12, with security patches into 2023 — the longest-supported iPhone of its era.
1 Design✎
The 5s reuses the iPhone 5's 7.6 mm, 112-gram aluminum unibody nearly unchanged. The visible differences: the home button lost its rounded-square icon and gained a sapphire crystal cover ringed in steel — the Touch ID assembly — and the flash opening became a dual-LED pill shape. Black & Slate gave way to a lighter "Space Gray" (whose anodizing wore better), Silver continued, and Gold joined the palette; Apple chose the champagne tone deliberately over jewelry-store yellow, and demand for it outstripped every forecast.
The display is the same 4-inch, 1136 × 640 Retina panel as the iPhone 5.
2 Touch ID✎
Touch ID reads a fingerprint capacitively through the sapphire home-button cover at 500 ppi, unlocking the phone and authorizing iTunes and App Store purchases with a resting touch. Apple stressed the security architecture: fingerprint data is converted to a mathematical representation stored in the A7's Secure Enclave, never uploaded, never accessible to apps. After years of smartphone fingerprint readers that were awkward swipe-strips, Touch ID's press-and-done reliability made biometric unlock mainstream — within two years it was table stakes across the industry, and it opened the door to Apple Pay a year later.
3 Hardware✎
| Developer | Apple |
|---|---|
| Generation | 7th (with iPhone 5c) |
| Announced | September 10, 2013 |
| Released | September 20, 2013 |
| Discontinued | March 21, 2016 |
| Predecessor | iPhone 5 |
| Successor | iPhone 6 · iPhone 6 Plus |
| Display | 4-inch Retina IPS LCD 1136 × 640 (326 ppi) |
| Chip | Apple A7 — first 64-bit phone chip (dual-core Cyclone, 1.3 GHz) + M7 motion coprocessor |
| RAM | 1 GB |
| Storage | 16 GB · 32 GB · 64 GB |
| Rear camera | 8 MP, f/2.2, 1.5µ pixels True Tone dual-LED flash 1080p video · 120 fps slo-mo (720p) |
| Front camera | 1.2 MP (720p FaceTime HD) |
| Battery | 1,560 mAh built-in |
| Security | Touch ID · Secure Enclave |
| Connectivity | LTE · Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n Bluetooth 4.0 |
| Colors | Gold · Silver · Space Gray |
| Launch price | $199 (16 GB) · $299 (32 GB) · $399 (64 GB) with 2-year contract (U.S.) |
| OS | iOS 7.0 ~ 12.5.7 |
The A7's 64-bit Cyclone cores arrived years before the industry expected the transition — Qualcomm's marketing chief dismissed it as a "gimmick" days before the company walked the comment back and reorganized around 64-bit parts. Beyond the architecture headline, the A7 roughly doubled the A6's performance and brought OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics; Apple simultaneously required the App Store toward 64-bit binaries, completing the platform transition within two years.
The M7 coprocessor continuously logged accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass data at a fraction of the main CPU's power draw, creating the always-on fitness-tracking substrate that CoreMotion apps — and later the Apple Watch pairing model — built on.
4 Camera✎
Apple kept the 8-megapixel count but enlarged the sensor 15% (1.5-micron pixels) and widened the aperture to f/2.2, continuing its bigger-pixels-over-more-pixels argument. The True Tone flash — a white and an amber LED firing in over a thousand mixed ratios — fixed the corpse-tone skin that single-LED flashes produced. Burst mode shot 10 fps with automatic best-shot selection, and 120 fps slow motion at 720p brought an effect previously reserved for dedicated cameras. Auto image stabilization blended multiple exposures in software.
5 Software✎
The 5s launched with iOS 7, Jony Ive's flat, translucent, typography-led overhaul — the most divisive redesign in the platform's history, and one whose motion effects literally made some users motion-sick until Apple added Reduce Motion. The 5s received iOS 8 through iOS 12, performing credibly even on its final major version thanks to iOS 12's optimization pass for older hardware; its last security update, iOS 12.5.7, arrived in January 2023 — nearly a decade of software life.
6 Release and reception✎
The 5s and 5c together sold nine million units in the launch weekend, and the 5s ran supply-constrained for months — Gold models resold at heavy premiums. Reviews called it the strongest "S" upgrade yet: Touch ID drew near-universal praise for actually working, the A7's 64-bit leap was recognized as strategically enormous even where its immediate benefit was debated, and the camera improvements were judged meaningful. The recurring criticisms were the unchanged 4-inch screen against a market of 5-inch flagships, and the 16 GB base tier.
Touch ID also attracted security researchers immediately: Germany's Chaos Computer Club spoofed it with a lifted fingerprint within days. The debate it triggered — convenience-biometrics versus lab-grade attacks — set the terms still used for every biometric system since.
The 5s was discontinued on March 21, 2016, its body and internals living on in the first iPhone SE.
7 Legacy✎
Touch ID and the Secure Enclave made biometric authentication a default expectation of every phone that followed, and became the foundation Apple Pay launched on. The A7's early 64-bit jump is remembered as one of Apple's most consequential silicon decisions, forcing an industry-wide architecture transition on Apple's schedule. And the 5s's decade of updates set the software-longevity standard the line still trades on — through to the current iPhone 17 generation.